Re: deprecating Postel's principle- considered harmful

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 5/7/19 3:48 PM, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
> I don't agree that poor application programming is a result of the 
> Postel principle, it's a result of incompetence or laziness.


For better or worse, significant portions of the Internet -- at least at 
the application layer -- run on what you're calling incompetence and/or 
laziness [1] . The question is: to what degree has Postel's Principle 
contributed to this state of affairs; and, if we think it's a major 
factor, can we change things so that future protocols don't suffer from 
this as much?

To be clear, I'm not reading this as trying to put the genie back in the 
bottle for already-deployed protocols like SMTP. I read this as 
suggesting that maybe future protocols should be a bit more picky about 
not accepting messages that are malformed or sequences of messages that 
are unorthodox, even if some degree of processing is technically possible.

/a

____
[1] More generously, they're probably more the result of things like 
cutting corners to meet deadlines and budgets, when the people cutting 
corners suffer no consequences for the resulting protocol pollution.