Is it necessary to cater to the cretins? Can't we let them deal with their own problems? It seems those who violated the standard are being rewarded by requiring the rest of the world to accommodate them.
It is not necessary to cater to cretins.
It is, however, necessary to avoid giving them wiggle room where they can point to the specification and claim that they are right and everybody else is wrong.
Why would a client interpret NO as a signal that it should do the parsing itself?That was the very thing that the original message in this thread suggested!But that was about "NO [PARSE]" specifically, wasn't it? I was talking about NO in general.
You are in your favorite text editor. You now give the command to go to the next screenful. The editor gets an I/O error.
Is it reasonable to say "no, you can't read that data, but you can read the rest of the file, and when you save I'll save it without that data"?
Or do you say "an impossible error has occurred, I'm giving up now, have the sysadmin fix it."
I vote -- strongly -- for the latter. If can open a mailbox, then I expect to be able to read what's in it, without having some fool server say "you can read messages 1 and 3 but not 2 because of some internal implementation consideration that is invisible to you."
Isn't it also reasonable to expect that things might change over time?If the server says that the message is there, then the client has a reasonable expectation that it can fetch it.
Why?
Why would you consider this to be a good thing?
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
