openpolitics.com

The XML world has been debating Postel's Law the last few days.

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."

Personally I disagree with the first half of the law when applied to XML -- the idea that aggregators should bend over backwards to accept poorly formed XML. I always understood that XML was trying to do something different, as a response to the awful mess that HTML became because browser vendors adopted the first half of Postel's philosophy.

Anyway, the other half of Postel's Law is just as interesting, but so far no one is commenting.

That, btw, was the purpose of my funky campaign a few weeks ago. Maybe I should have called it Dave's Campaign for the Second Half of Postel's Law.

Lessig: we wanted to run an ethenet cable from the basement to the roof, but we we had problems because the conduit makes several 90-degree turns.

Solution: look it up on google

It didn't give us the exact answer, but it inspired us to use a vacuum cleaner and foam.

Tim Bray responds to discussion about XML's error handling

Dracon advocated the death penalty for "crimes both low and high". Similarly, a conforming XML processor must "not continue normal processing" once it detects a fatal error.

So what's a fatal error?

This isn't discussed much, but the minimum is "well-formedness"

• Otherwise Syndiation is a mess. You're making a lot of work for yourself later on if you're [permissive] about Illegal characters, etc
• If developers [and content providers] are not willing to put in [a small] effort to enable the non-white people of the world to use their software, [their grapes are prabably not worth eating anyway], and I don?t think PEAW should condone or reward them.

Related

Response to Aaron Swartz: Postel?s Law Has No Exceptions.

PEAW Mailing List

Comment

I've really got to work on my own rss feed. The character encoding doesn't seem to work and the content is all mashed together. So far I've been trying the "release early and often" philosophy.