[OTR-users] some questions

[Chad Perrin]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 12:05:43AM -0500, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
> Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> writes:
> 
> > Of course, in such circumstances you must simply get as close as
> > possible.  The principle itself still holds, though.
> 
> The principle leads to disaser when, years down the road, you find
> yourself locked into "liberal" meanings of the protocol - even when a
> tighter reading of whatever specification you have would be more
> useful - beacuse most users, who shouldn't have to care about this
> stuff, will rightly complain when a formally in-spec change breaks the
> behavior they've come to expect.
> 
> I think the "be liberal in what you accept" principle should have been
> shot and buried when it stopped being possible to harass the authors
> of all of the software that you use at the next USENIX.

I guess you missed the "strict in what you emit" part.

Being liberal in what you accept simply ensures that you won't see a
bunch of pseudo-markup crap in the midst of your messages when you
receive something from a user of an out-of-spec application.  Ensure you
meet spec first, then work to accept out-of-spec stuff in addition
without sacrificing in-spec functionality.  Why not?

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.