[HN Gopher] How to read an RFC (2018)
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       How to read an RFC (2018)
        
       Author : mattrighetti
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2022-04-23 10:21 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ietf.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ietf.org)
        
       | Rediscover wrote:
       | I hoped to have seen Jon Postel's quote of "Be conservative in
       | what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" somewhere
       | in the various /interpretation/ sections, but, alas, no - not to
       | be found.
        
         | chrismorgan wrote:
         | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-iab-protocol-mai...
         | 
         | > _The robustness principle, often phrased as "be conservative
         | in what you send, and liberal in what you accept", has long
         | guided the design and implementation of Internet protocols. The
         | posture this statement advocates promotes interoperability in
         | the short term, but can negatively affect the protocol
         | ecosystem over time. For a protocol that is actively
         | maintained, the robustness principle can, and should, be
         | avoided._
         | 
         | (As an IAB draft they've called it protocol-maintenance, but I
         | liked the original name Thomson gave it: postel-was-wrong.)
        
       | pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
       | > These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by
       | developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as
       | irrelevant because they can't be understood.
       | 
       | My biggest problem with reading RFCs is not because they are hard
       | to understand, it's because they are vague, underspecified or
       | don't accurately describe reality.
       | 
       | The most infamous example of underspecification being, of course,
       | JSON.
        
         | andi999 wrote:
         | I thought json is fully specified. Or just not in the rfc?
        
           | pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
           | <https://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html>
           | 
           | Much of the implementation divergence is the fault of
           | underspecification (though not all; some of it is just shoddy
           | coding in its own right). The original RFC described only the
           | grammar of JSON, not equivalence of JSON texts or
           | normalization. Later specifications try to paper over that
           | fact by specifying certain interoperability conditions
           | without outright requiring them for conformance.
        
           | gumby wrote:
           | What is a number?
        
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