[amluto]

> I'm hoping this is satire. Why intentionally introduce potential bugs for the sake of making a point?

It’s worse than satire. Postel’s Law is definitively wrong, at least in the context of network protocols, and delimiters, especially, MUST be precise. See, for example:

https://www.postfix.org/smtp-smuggling.html

Send exactly what the spec requires, and parse exactly as the spec requires. Do not accept garbage. And LF, where CRLF is specified, is garbage.

[tptacek]

If two systems agree, independent of any specification someone somewhere else wrote, to accept a bare NL where a CRLF is specified, that is not "garbage". Standards documents are not laws; the horse drags the cart.

[djbusby]

That's just two systems that happen to agree on garbage.

[throwaway19972]

At that point, what does garbage even mean? There's just functional software and non-functional software.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> Standards documents are not laws; the horse drags the cart.

They can be: c.f. legally-enforced safety-regulations.

[tptacek]

These aren't.

[Joker_vD]

This is, by the way, exactly the stance the Microsoft used to have in the 90-s and 00-s on the standards (it probably still has). And MS caught a lot of flak for that, for a very good reason.

[perching_aix]

Laws are also just some ink on paper (and are routinely overruled, circumvented or unenforced in certain jurisdictions), so using this kind of logic in order to encourage standard violations is unsound.

There is a method to this madness, and that's revising the standards.

[tptacek]

What's a "standard violation"? The original history of the IETF is a rejection of exactly this mode of thinking about the inviolability of standards, which was the ethos of the OSI.

[nsnshsuejeb]

Elephant in the room is the trillions of actual servers and user agents that would need to be tested and patched if you retroactively change a standard. Luckily there are some digits after HTTP that allow the concept of new versions of the standard.

[perching_aix]

When an implementation is noncomformant to a standard in question.

[sophacles]

I've implemented a lot of protocols. Most implementations I've come across for most protocols not strictly standards conformant, for many reasons.

Big ones being:

* The standards are often not detailed enough, or contain enough loose verbage that there are many ways to understand how to implement some part, yet those ways are not interoperable.

* Many protocols allow vendor specifications in such a way that 2 implementations that are 100% compliant won't interoperate.

* Many protocol implementations are interoperable quite well, converging on behavior that isn't specified in any standard (often to the surprise of people who haven't read the relevant standards)

At least this is my experience for ietf rfc standards.

[perching_aix]

I'm aware of these factors, wasn't trying to suggest that the practice doesn't differ from the theory. What I was more going for was to highlight that the goal should be to primarily try and have these eventually converge, preferably sooner than later, not trying to strongarm the practice side and wait for the standards body in question to wake up one day and decide to amend the standard. That might give the impression of suddenness, but the core issue remains unsolved that way.

Usually when there's a high disparity between the "de jure" and the "de facto", it's due to a discrepancy in the interests and the leverage, resulting in a breakdown in communication and cooperation. Laying into either then is a bandaid attempt, not a solution. It's how either standard sprawl starts, or how standards bodies lose relevance.

[tptacek]

IETF standards are tools to help developers get stuff done on the Internet. They are not the only tool, and they don't carry any moral force.

[perching_aix]

Apart from colloquially considering standards not-necessarily-normative being, in my opinion, nonsensical (see below), to the best of my knowledge at the very least the STD subseries of IETF standards documents are normative in nature: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/std

> They are not the only tool, and they don't carry any moral force.

Indeed there are countless other standards bodies in the world also producing normative definitions for many things, so I'm definitely a bit confused why the focus on IETF specifically.

To be even more exact, I do not know of any standards bodies who would publish what they and the world consider as standards, that would be entirely, or at least primarily, informational rather than normative in nature. Like, do I know the word "standard" incorrectly? What even is a point of a standard, if it doesn't aim to control?