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Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

Not really. Standards are nice, but as time goes on, things change, and we should NEVER only change things 'once a standard says so'. The web is an ever evolving platform, and standards are loosely respected these days anyway. Heck, browsers aren't a standard themselves!

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By that logic there isn't any point to standards at all. If we all are supposed to ignore them when we feel like it then what's the point of having them at all?

If there is a standard published for something, follow it or publish your own RFC. Don't just nitpick the bits you want and break clients in the process.

They're provided as guidance. They aren't some kind of internet law. Sometimes contravening standards is harmful; sometimes it's helpful. It's not productive to point at them as if they were dispositive in debates.

There is a bit more to it though: When a vendor declares compliance to a standard and fails to implement it correctly, then the vendor can be held accountable, and a customer is in a much better position to negotiate a correction. For this reason, standards are also important from a legal perspective.

Nope. If web standards worked, the benefits would be a stable platform where you can easily create new software that both produced or consumed content without breaking anything.

Of course that isn't what is happening at all. Instead we're having the usual heap of politics and ever-faster update cycles. So I'd agree to say that web standards failed - but not that they were meant as a guidiance in the first place.

Not really. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791 ^ Was burned in hardware all over the planet.

People play games with IP all the time.

Sure, but there isn't a big company with clout saying "Hey, you should deviate from RFC791".

I agree that standards can and should be replaced/amended to over time, but I kinda see what GP's point is getting at.

Dropping Via from a response is roughly in the same category as ignoring the TCP Urgent flag. Most widely used standards have vestigial bits.

A lot of hardware silently edits TOS flags, causing trouble with ECN and diff-serv...

Ignoring is usually fine. Dropping is not.

> Don't just nitpick the bits you want

<nitpick> Only people who like lice eggs nitpick the bits they want. Others pick-and-choose. </nitpick>

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/nit

You, sir, have achieved a new level of pedantic.

I do disagree with the parent's wording that it isn't "debatable". At the same time, I think the point trying to be made is that the article disregards the debates made for it. This seems to show itself in the fact that the article talks mainly of how browsers do not use Via. The problem being that the debate around the RFC was for an entirely different use case. As per the RFC spec, a lot of it was around protocol capabilities.

Thus it may not be useful to the browser. But the article saying that its usage is debatable in this context is very wrong.

So then re-write and submit an RFC...or go to IETF and join a WG - be open to discussion and speak up about what needs changed.

A MUST is a MUST, in my opinion - and too often there are serious issues in (web) communication because people ignore them as they see fit.

In either event - no one is saying that you should wait to change an RFC (or wording in an RFC) until it's fully deprecated and completely not in use - but a lot of people use RFC's for researching issues, especially in areas they are not 100% familiar with. Coming across a MUST and seeing that some software vendor or hardware vendor doesn't follow it is all too common. This delays certain projects by weeks, sometimes longer, and costs the involved companies lots of money. RFC's exist for a reason...because the approved standards are just expected to be followed when creating new things.

Some things are just wrong. I've implemented SIP, a horrible standard. Lots of compatibility issues just from their insistence on a "human friendly" text format alone.

At any rate there's lots of things you just have to ignore, drop, reject, and otherwise muck about with in order to run a sane network. These standards are not written with software experience. They're written much in a vacuum and out of touch. This varies widely across RFCs so it might not apply to RFCs you like.

Example of a MUST for SIP and HTTP: line folding and comments in headers. Apart from being crap for performance (so much for being able to zero-copy a header value as just a pointer+len) there's zero legitimate use for these "features" of the syntax. Simply rejecting such messages is in your best interest as a network operator.

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