On 3/12/2015 5:24 PM, Tom Paseka wrote:
Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept
As with all terse summaries, the meaning of this is easy to distort. In the unfortunately not-so-uncommon extreme, it is used to argue for demanding acceptance of all manner of random cruft, essentially translating into "the protocol requires you to support anything I send you." This, of course, is not what Jon meant. Rather, he noted the fact that protocol specifications invariably contain some ambiguities which, equally invariably, get interpreted differently by different, reasonable implementers. Hence the stricture to meant to guide the sending of what an implementer should consider to be the most conservative interpretations, and accept the most liberal (different) interpretations. d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net