How compassion saved and broke the internet
March 19th, 2008
Jon Postel, the late computer science guru pictured above, is widely credited with the following dictum:
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
This has come to be known as Postel’s Law, and it’s not explicitly about how people should treat one another.
Instead, Dr. Postel was talking about the problem of interoperability between systems on networks. Since international standards for transmitting information are so complex, he figured the best thing to do would be for everyone to attempt to conform to the standards, but be forgiving of others who fail.
According to Joel Spolsky, this was a tremendously flawed approach because even though it allowed for a boom in networking, it also allowed syntax errors to propagate through the network unnoticed. His lengthy, but generally entertaining article explaining why this is keeping Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 team awake at night, is worth a read if you’re into techie stuff. Or simply if you have a thing for winter driving on Mars and ultra-orthodox Jewish communities. (Not kidding.)
Read the whole thing at Joel on Software (via Kevin Korpi’s Google Talk status bar).