Re: [arch-d] deprecating Postel's principle- considered harmful

["Henry S. Thompson" <[e-mail]>]

Bob Briscoe writes:

> ...
>
> Let's explore the idea that incentives are needed to encourage senders
> to tighten-up, rather than permanently rely on the receiver's
> liberality. Henning's responsible disclosure example is a good one,
> but it relies on a lot of human intervention at both ends. The EDNS
> flag day example was also effort-intensive.
>
> Perhaps we need something between Error and Warning, that says
> "Warning, Error imminent". Then, if the developer of the sender
> doesn't stop relying on the liberality of the receiver after a stated
> deadline, the receiver will stop being liberal, and communication will
> subsequently fail (or incrementally degrade, or publicly disclose the
> developer's laziness, etc).

Further to this, and to some of Henning's points, the XHTML vs. HTML5
example I raised earlier [1] provides an example of a missed opportunity
to implement something very much along thos lines.  At the height of the
(X)HTML debate, in 2008, Berners-Lee made a presentation to the W3C
arguing for a feedback-and-incentive-based approach to getting people to
stop serving broken HTML.  The write-up of this is now (thanks!) 
publicly available [2], and I recommend it.  For the purposes of this
discussion, you may want to skip the historical/technical introduction
at the beginning and go straight to the *Robustness Principle*, near the
bottom of the first column.

ht

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/architecture-discuss/UEio_fmkxDR8Uj4njD5ajb2e_DA
[2] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTML-XML.html
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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