[akira2501]

The complexity of CRLF?

The balance here, of course, being backwards compatability. I'd sooner kill EBCDIC, bad ASCII and Code Pages than worry about CRLF if we didn't have to care about ancient systems.

Programming languages still retain C's operator precedence hierarchy even though it was itself meant to be a backwards compatible compromise and leads to errors around logical operator expressions.

Anyways, this article is about actively breaking systems like some kind of protocol terrorist in order to achieve an outcome at any cost, if it was merely along the lines of "CRLF considered harmful in new protocols" I'd have nothing to say.

[eviks]

> The complexity of CRLF?

You didn't limit your general admiration of standards to CRLF, so no, not only that.

> about actively breaking systems like some kind of protocol terrorist in order to achieve an outcome at any cost,

That's simply false, he isn't

> Almost all implementations of these protocols will accept a bare NL as an end-of-line mark, even if it is technically incorrect.

[akira2501]

> You didn't limit your general admiration of standards to CRLF, so no, not only that.

So your position, then, is that all standards include "needless complexity?" What argument are you actually trying to make here?

> That's simply false, he isn't

Yea.. that's why the word "like" is present, it implies a near association, not a direct accusation.

> Almost all implementations of these protocols will accept a bare NL as an end-of-line mark, even if it is technically incorrect.

So, right back to my original point, then, standards prevent people from having to debug dumb issues that could have been avoided. This advice is basically "go ahead, create dumb issues, see if I care."

I may have flippantly labeled that as "protocol terrorism" but I don't think it's pure hyperbole either.

[eviks]

> What argument are you actually trying to make here?

That you're mistaken in your one-sided generalization of the benefits of standards.

> So your position, then, is that all standards include "needless complexity?"

No, that's just another extreme you've made up.

> Yea.. that's why the word "like" is present, it implies a near association, not a direct accusation.

Your mistake is before "like", you can't be "about actively breaking systems" when you explicitly say that no systems will be broken

> "see if I care."

That this is false is also easy to see - the author reverted a change after he realized it breaks something ancient, so clearly he does care.

> standards prevent people from having to debug dumb issues that could have been avoided.

Not to circle the conversaion back to my original response to your point: why do you think "Almost all implementations" break the standard and "accept a bare NL"? Could it be that such unintuitive limitations don't prevent anything, and people still have to debug "dumb issues" because common expectations are more powerful?

[LegionMammal978]

> Almost all implementations of these protocols will accept a bare NL as an end-of-line mark, even if it is technically incorrect.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41832555 as far as HTTP/1.1 goes, it's definitely common but far from universal. The big problem with "it's 100% safe to make this change, since it doesn't break anything I know about" is that there are always a lot of things you don't know about, not all of which can be boiled down to being negligible weirdos.