On 5/7/19 4:13 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
I note that both Adam and Barry in their emails talk about this being
particularly applicable at the upper layers.
Please don't confuse "at least" with "particularly" in my response. I'm
just acknowledging that I don't have the expertise to speak to the other
layers.
I know that lower layers *have* had issues with accepting and attempting
to interpret, e.g., Christmas Tree Packets with varying degrees of issue
arising, so the situation is certainly not *isolated* to applications.
/a
On 5/7/19 5:00 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
On 5/7/19 3:48 PM, Andrew G. Malis wrote:
I don't agree that poor application programming is a result of the
Postel principle, it's a result of incompetence or laziness.
For better or worse, significant portions of the Internet -- at least
at the application layer -- run on what you're calling incompetence
and/or laziness [1] . The question is: to what degree has Postel's
Principle contributed to this state of affairs; and, if we think it's
a major factor, can we change things so that future protocols don't
suffer from this as much?
To be clear, I'm not reading this as trying to put the genie back in
the bottle for already-deployed protocols like SMTP. I read this as
suggesting that maybe future protocols should be a bit more picky
about not accepting messages that are malformed or sequences of
messages that are unorthodox, even if some degree of processing is
technically possible.
/a
____
[1] More generously, they're probably more the result of things like
cutting corners to meet deadlines and budgets, when the people
cutting corners suffer no consequences for the resulting protocol
pollution.
