http://i.imgur.com/6WtA0.png
(Sorry, it's Friday. Also, blame dchud for the idea.)
-Sean
On 4/6/11 4:53 PM, "Mike Taylor" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
|
