[ColinWright]

Be generous in what you accept, strict in what you provide.

Without that general principle the internet would never have got working. Even now, "standards" shift, and it's important that older sites don't simply stop working because of things that were once perfectly valid becoming slightly out-of-fashion.

Complexity is like a dead cat under the carpet. You can push it around all you like, but it will still be there, and someone still needs to deal with it.

It's just a shame that after a while it starts to smell, and the smell is hard to get rid of.

[edge17]

So true. Imagine the dead cats under the rugs that we entrust our lives to every day... traffic lights, onboard computers, flight navigation software. Anyone seasoned in software knows that the point is not to write bugfree software but to understand what your code is doing and how it's impacting things across the whole system. Code is very very complex and bugs can be introduced from compilers, third part libraries, yourself, system upgrades, hardware issues, etc.