On 2025-07-25 at 13:07, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > On Fri, Jul 25, 2025 at 12:37 PM Greg <curtys...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On 2025-07-21, Anders Andersson <pipat...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> At some point you have to stop pandering to the absolute lowest >>> common denominator. >> >> Postel's law: >> >> "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send. > > That's from a bygone era, when the internet was young and innocent.
It's actually a programming guideline: applications should do their best to handle wide-ranging input (including malformed input) appropriately, but should constrain themselves to only emitting strictly-defined and well-formed output. The version of Postel's principle which I first became familiar with used the verb "emit" rather than "send". The principle does have its applicability to people, as well, but as with so many things the limits of implementation on human hardware are more constraining than those on electronic hardware; human beings have much tighter limits on such things as exhaustion, even if nothing else. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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