Monday 10 September 2007

Postel's Law

In the 1981 RFC that defines the Transmission Control Protocol, RFC 793, American computer scientist Jon Postel set forth a robustness principle (known otherwise as Postel's law) imperative:

   Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in which you accept from others.

The principle suggests that Internet software developers carefully write software that adheres closely to extant RFCs but accept and embrace input from others that is not wholly consistent with those RFCs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_Principle

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