From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,971aa11c293c3db1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-07-29 18:53:56 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!sn-xit-02!supernews.com!newsfeed.direct.ca!look.ca!newshub2.rdc1.sfba.home.com!news.home.com!news1.rdc2.on.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3B64BE2D.92067B3D@home.com> From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: When correct software meets illegal data (was: Ada The Best...) References: <3B63260D.6F4819@PublicPropertySoftware.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 01:53:54 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.141.193.224 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.rdc2.on.home.com 996458034 24.141.193.224 (Sun, 29 Jul 2001 18:53:54 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 18:53:54 PDT Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10705 Date: 2001-07-30T01:53:54+00:00 List-Id: Al Christians wrote: > 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 This is an example of "user convenience", rather than "fault tolerance". A web browser naturally can assume http, since it will be rarer for that user to use ftp or telnet for example. But accepting web pages with missing tags etc. is poor practice. If all browsers just dumped straight uninterpreted html at the point of failure to the end of the document, more webmeisters might fix the problem. Instead, because they "test" it with their favourite browser(s), they "see no evil" to correct, and don't. -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://members.home.net/ve3wwg