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principles:postel_s_law

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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

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

Example

Description Status

Further Reading

principles/postel_s_law.1634105937.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021-10-13 08:18 by 194.209.25.108