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From: Al Christians <alc@PublicPropertySoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: When correct software meets illegal data (was: Ada The Best...)
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 13:52:29 -0700
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Date: 2001-07-28T13:52:29-07:00
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tmoran@acm.org wrote:
>    I learned long ago never to trust a description of input data.
> Ada has saved me more than once from new and wonderful permutations
> of input that I never thought of, even while programming defensively. :)

But the whole worldwide web situation is a tribute to software that
does what one means rather than rigidly following a spec.  What happens
when you type www.adapower.com (for example) into the url line on
your browser?  It adds a prefix of 'http://'  absolutely gratis.  It
also adds a suffix of '/'  absolutely gratis.  Then it starts looking
for home pages home.html, home.htm, index.htm, etc. Then it shows you
some content, even though you didn't tell it exactly what you wanted.

And what percentage of web pages are absolutely correct HTML?  IDK,
but I know that mine aren't.  There are all kinds of HTML peccadillos
that are ignored or worked with by the successful browsers.  If 
everything had to be correct, the worldwide web would be the worldwide
wasn't.


Al