Julian Reschke <> proposes:
> The issue is different. If server A (sold by a big company and widely
> deployed) accepts broken requests, clients may start relying
> on that behaviour. Other, smaller vendors thereby have the
> choice of either implementing to the spec (rejecting the
> broken requests) or emulating the broken server behaviour.
>
> My point being, unless *everybody* is accepting the same kind
> of broken requests, interoperability will actually be
> *worse*. But if indeed everybody
> *is* accepting the same requests, it would have made more
> sense to actually define this as *correct* behaviour and have
> draconian error checking.
I don't think the situation works out that bad in reality: years ago I
worked with a company that developed software for the exchange of X.12
health care data and Blue Cross/Blue Shield ("standard") health care
data. Very regularly we would run into data produced by other vendors
that did not conform to one standard or another. I don't think we ever
encountered a case where the vendor emitting the offending data was not
willing to fix their software to emit conformant data...
