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principles:postel_s_law

Postel's Law

Variants and Alternative Names

  • General Principle of Robustness (not to be confused with Eric S. Raymond's Rule of Robustness)

Context

Principle Statement

“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”1)

Description

Rationale

Strategies

Caveats

See section contrary principles.

Origin

Evidence

Relations to Other Principles

Generalizations

Specializations

Contrary Principles

  • Fail fast (FF): While FF is (amongst others) about checking for erroneous parameters, Postel's Law is about not being too strict with parameters. It says that the design should allow for uncommon or strangely arranged (yet meaningful) input data. This does not contradict FF as Postel's Law does not demand to process meaningless or erroneous data.

Complementary Principles

Principle Collections

Examples

Description Status

Further Reading

Discussion

Discuss this wiki article and the principle on the corresponding talk page.

principles/postel_s_law.txt · Last modified: 2021-10-18 21:43 by christian