Documents with mixed languages

[Philip Linde]

On Sun, 12 Dec 2021 09:46:15 -0500
Michael Lazar <lazar.michael22 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Speak for yourself. De-facto standards are social proof that a subset
> of the community actually wants and will use a feature. Which is much
> more convincing to me than a loud minority arguing for (or against)
> something based on principle alone.

A de facto standard, as far as it's actually implemented, is at best
evidence that current implementors are willing to to implement it. This
in itself represents a minority.

The point of a well-defined standard is that while creating that
definition might be a social process, learning and implementing it
doesn't have to be. The ideal outcome of a formal, canonical standard is
that an implementor should not have to go spelunking and survey existing
implementation (or indeed this mailing list) to learn what feature set
a client or a server is currently expected to implement not to be
effectively broken.

For example, I can go to your capsule and discover your streaming chat.
This might have worried me based on just a basic description of a
living standard, but because there is a formal standard according to
which a client handles a response only after the server closes the
connection of the transaction, I can instead treat it as a weird
mutation of the protocol, and generally not worry about the whims of
a few implementors that ignore the spec in various ways. In this way, I
avoid the tyranny of a multitude of "loud minorities" that would have
been much more disruptive without a canonical specification of the
protocol.

-- 
Philip
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