[HN Gopher] Vague Standards Are Trouble
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Vague Standards Are Trouble
Author : kencausey
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-04-08 16:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| jchw wrote:
| I believe I may have run into this issue trying to get an old IDE
| hard drive from a NEC PC-9800 computer to load elsewhere.
| Truthfully, I had more issues than just the capacity being
| terribly wrong, but I bet that does explain how that happened.
|
| I wonder if then, there is a particularly good IDE controller for
| this use...
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I don't think the standard was vague... It just didn't describe
| how to transfer a double word. So instead of the standard being
| vague, I see it as the drives violating the at that time current
| ATA spec.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > I see it as the drives violating the at that time current ATA
| spec.
|
| How are they violating the spec if
|
| > It just didn't describe how to transfer a double word.
|
| The standard was vague, because it specified (a) there is a
| double-word value, and (b) communication goes over a single-
| word data bus, but not (c) how to transfer the double-word
| value over the single-word data bus, leading to drive
| manufacturers pick the way they liked the most.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| The IDENTIFY command also returns some strings for the
| manufacturer/drive id, which are defined as having the first/even
| character in bits 15:8. Stored in memory on a little-endian
| system, "TOSHIBA " becomes "OTHSBI A".
|
| So it kind of made sense to think IDE was big-endian, because
| that would at least be consistent.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Postel's law etc. etc.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And all the problems it creates.
|
| But then, if your standard is broken, living with the problems
| caused by Postel's law is much easier than with the problems
| caused by not following it.
| Findecanor wrote:
| In the case of binary formats, the application of Postel's
| "Law" is in practice only a workaround, used when there existed
| multiple different interpretations of a vague standard. If the
| standard had been defined properly in the first place,
| workarounds wouldn't have been needed.
|
| I've seen Postel's Law being made official recommendation even
| -- in an addendum document to a standard. The addendum got
| published only because the situation had become a mess.
| pmarreck wrote:
| which has had some backlash of late? it seems that one should
| not be liberal in any capacity because it results in undetected
| corner-cases
|
| https://ardalis.com/postels-law-robustness-principle/
|
| https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03....
| l0b0 wrote:
| Postel's law is for when it's hopeless to get to a sane
| standard in the near-to-mid term, as with HTML and JS back in
| the day. Browsers had to implement ridiculously lenient
| parsing to provide a reasonable user experience on top of
| terrible markup and scripts.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I don't recall how long it was; but there was a period there
| where we avoided "IDE" as too new and not standardized yet. I
| wanna say 80MB drives to about 500MB, thereabouts. The last
| period of time when people bought copies of "SpinRite"
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