[pdkl95]

The robustness principle is fine, but it does need to be strictly interpreted, which I should have mentioned. Too often robustness is used as a license to be sloppy or to abuse lenient parsers with invalid input.

Meredith covers this specific issue at 33:25 in her 28c3 talk I referenced ([2]). "Be definite in what you accept" can emulate traditional "liberal" parsers if the compatibility is strictly defined in the grammar.

I really should have phrased that better; the robustness principle is great historically, and is therefor necessary in many current protocols, but newer protocols should be using well-defined either regular grammars or deterministic context-free grammars. As Meredith and Sergey explain in that talk, moving away form Turing complete protocols would prevent an important class of exploits.