"Be strict in what you send; be generous in what you accept. When I talk to you, I should do my best to follow the rules. When you listen, you should do your best to understand me even if I break them a bit. That philosophy, baked into early internet protocols, doubled our chances that any two systems would interoperate."
"In the 2000s, companies bet big on XML. The idea was simple: one universal format for sharing data, with a rulebook that spelled out exactly what every document should look like. In theory, software would just plug into that rulebook and everything would work automatically. In practice, the rulebooks became massive, the tools were brittle, and people spent a lot of time arguing about the rules."
The internet's ability to connect disparate systems globally without central planning stems from Postel's Law: senders should strictly follow rules while receivers should generously interpret messages. This philosophy, embedded in early internet protocols, doubled the chances of system interoperability. Over thirty years, attempts to apply this principle at higher technology layers have produced mixed results. The 2000s XML standardization effort created complex rulesets that proved brittle, though it successfully exposed machine-readable APIs over HTTP, paving the way for simpler formats like JSON. The 2010s repeated this pattern with blockchain technology, which promised distributed ledgers for supply chain and invoice tracking.
#postels-law #internet-interoperability #technology-standardization #xml-and-json #distributed-systems
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