[parasubvert]

The problem isnt so simple in the world of large scale protocol design - standards are rarely successful when imposed, they're usually adopted as a reflection of the current implementations. And when you're dealing with multiple independent implementations the variance can be subtle, and the standards often are broken or at best under-specified at first.

When dealing with integration among many parties, there is tremendous pressure to just "make it work". The web arguably is an example of this - the standards were post-facto representations of what's already implemented.

Of course we are all hating the long term implications on our codebases , but "let's force everyone to do it one way through strict behaviour" seems to discount the social dynamics of interoperability.

Moving away from Postel's principle in production will not lead to successful open and interoperable implementations, it will rather trend towards towards one single implementation , likely open source, that is shared and tweaked by all. That has some positive (interop!) and negative implications (limited ability to innovate / dragged down into programmer religions, etc).