On 6 April 2011 19:53, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 4/6/2011 2:43 PM, William Denton wrote:
>>
>> "Validity" does mean something definite ... but Postel's Law is a good
>> guideline, especially with the swamp of bad MARC, old MARC, alternate
>> MARC, that's out there.  Valid MARC is valid MARC, but if---for the sake
>> of file and its magic---we can identify technically invalid but still
>> usable MARC, that's good.
>
> Hmm, accept in the case of Web Browsers, I think general consensus is
> Postel's law was not helpful. These days, most people seem to think that
> having different browsers be tolerant of invalid data in different ways was
> actually harmful rather than helpful to inter-operability (which is
> theoretically the goal of Postel's law), and that's not what people do
> anymore in web browser land, at least not to the extremes they used to do
> it.

But the idea that browsers should be less permissive in what they
accept is a modern one that we now have the luxury of only because
adherence to Postel's law in the early days of the Web allowed it to
become ubiquitous.  Though it's true, as Harvey Thompson has observed
that "it's difficult to retro-fit correctness", Clay Shirky was also
very right when he pointed out that "You cannot simultaneously have
mass adoption and rigor".  If browsers in 1995 had been as pedantic as
the browsers of 2011 (rightly) are, we wouldn't even have the Web; or
if it existed at all it would just be a nichey thing that a few
scientists used to make their publications available to each other.

So while I agree that in the case of HTML we are right to now be
moving towards more rigorous demands of what to accept (as well, of
course, as being conservative in what we emit), I don't think we could
have made the leap from nothing to modern rigour.

-- Mike