Conversation

The more I think about it, the more I feel that Postel’s law (“be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”) is an aphorism that is very applicable to file formats and much less applicable to protocols

With protocols you have the opportunity to reject then and there; with file formats, you generally just have to deal with whatever garbage someone emitted 30 years ago and in general you can’t know who the recipient is so all content adaptation has to be done on the recipient side (or by the sender providing graceful degredation alternatives)