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From: Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@instinctive.eu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: [Slightly OT] How to process lightweight text markup languages?
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 19:16:39 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2015-01-20T19:16:39+00:00
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On 2015-01-19, Randy Brukardt <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> No, this is a fallicy. The Internet (and world in general) would be better 
> off if documents that are sufficiently malformed were simply not displayed 
> at all. In that case, the document source would be fixed if anyone cares 
> enough.
>
> As it is, the attempts at autocorrection leave huge holes in the safety of 
> the Internet (thus the world at large, as the Internet has become so 
> intergral). Malware filters cannot by their nature guess all of the ways 
> that some idiot tool will deal with malformed input, meaning that there are 
> always holes in the defenses to exploit.
>
> And for what? So that people who can't be bothered to get their documents 
> formatted correctly still get some results (thus reenforcing their bad 
> behavior). Bah humbug!!

I wholeheartedly agree, and I would have said as much myself, but...

... but I take the world as it is, and I won't go on a crusade against
behaviors I consider bad.

In that particular case, I'm taking an existing corpus and an existing
user base, so I feel my engineering duty is to not cause a regression,
even when doing so promotes sloppiness.

And even more so when my contribution (or lack of thereof) to sloppiness
promotion is such a tiny droplet in a markdown-powered ocean of
stack-overflow, reddit, github, etc.

I'm aware of how anti-Ada it is to cater the majority's sloppiness, but
I do have different standards for different areas of my life.


Natasha