Bob Briscoe writes: > ... > > Let's explore the idea that incentives are needed to encourage senders > to tighten-up, rather than permanently rely on the receiver's > liberality. Henning's responsible disclosure example is a good one, > but it relies on a lot of human intervention at both ends. The EDNS > flag day example was also effort-intensive. > > Perhaps we need something between Error and Warning, that says > "Warning, Error imminent". Then, if the developer of the sender > doesn't stop relying on the liberality of the receiver after a stated > deadline, the receiver will stop being liberal, and communication will > subsequently fail (or incrementally degrade, or publicly disclose the > developer's laziness, etc). Further to this, and to some of Henning's points, the XHTML vs. HTML5 example I raised earlier [1] provides an example of a missed opportunity to implement something very much along thos lines. At the height of the (X)HTML debate, in 2008, Berners-Lee made a presentation to the W3C arguing for a feedback-and-incentive-based approach to getting people to stop serving broken HTML. The write-up of this is now (thanks!) publicly available [2], and I recommend it. For the purposes of this discussion, you may want to skip the historical/technical introduction at the beginning and go straight to the *Robustness Principle*, near the bottom of the first column. ht [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/architecture-discuss/UEio_fmkxDR8Uj4njD5ajb2e_DA [2] https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTML-XML.html -- Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@xxxxxxxxxxxx URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam] The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
