Comment by ironick - Hacker Neue

ironick Jul 4, 2015 parent

I don't give this reminiscence ANY credit. The very first version of Postel's law makes it VERY clear that Postel intended his law to deal with non-compliant behavior in a tolerant or "liberal" way: "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. That is, it should be careful to send well-formed datagrams, but should accept any datagram that it can interpret (e.g., not object to technical errors where the meaning is still clear)."

See my potted history of Postel's law: http://ironick.typepad.com/ironick/2005/05/my_history_of_t.h...

hyperpape Jul 7, 2015

Nice to see that so well documented: I'd only seen the one most common reference, RFC 793.

That said, it's still unclear how far this extends: the example given is of an unknown error code, which might lead you to think that the requirement is "syntactically well-formed input where you can't 100% determine the semantics." That's a far cry from the way browsers handle malformed HTML. Similarly, you have to apply some judgment concerning what an agent can interpret the meaning of.

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