Re: [funsec] "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Ferg wrote:

> Jon, belatedly, I'm sorry I forgot until today...
>
> You were one of my real heroes.
>
>  http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/2005/10/belatedly-october-16-1998-rip-jon.html

At the risk of having all my extremities painfully removed should we 
ever meet, you do recognize that what is probably bound to be Postel's 
longest lasting and greatest effect on "the net" -- the so-called 
"Postel's robustness principle", encapsulated in quotation you opened 
that page with and used as the Subject: line in this thread -- is, in 
fact, a terribly bad thing, encouraging all manner of extraordinarily 
crappy implementations of what were generally already incredibly 
crappily written and "mal-specified" protocols and such.

But worse, it has been more widely adopted across great swathes of 
computer software development to the point that it is probably the 
single largest contributor to all that makes hilarious the use of the 
word "engineering" in the trendily modern term "software engineering".

I say a pox on Postel's robustness principle and all who ever wrote a 
line of code under its "direction"...


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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