[arp242]

HTML is rather different because it's authored by people. It's typically (though not always!) a good idea to not be too pedantic about accepting user input if you can. XHTML (served with the correct Content-Type) will completely error out if you made a typo and didn't test carefully enough. Useful in dev cycle? Sure. In production? Less so. "The entire page goes tits up because you used <br> instead of <br />" is just not helpful (and also: needlessly pedantic).

But that doesn't really apply to protocols like TCP. Postel's "law" is best understood in the context of 1980, when TCP had been around for a while but without a real standard, everyone was kind of experimenting, and there were tons of little incompatibilities. In this context, it was reasonable and practical advice.

For a lot of other things though: not so much. "Fail fast" is typically the better approach, which will benefit everyone, especially the people implementing the protocols.

This is also why Sendmail became the de-facto standard around the same time by the way: it was bug-compatible with everything else. Later this become a liability (sendmail.cf!), but originally it was a great feature.