Author: slush 2014-06-25 14:15:01
Published on: 2014-06-25T14:15:01+00:00
In an email conversation, Mike Hearn explained that the protocol is there to contain features and there is no benefit to blindly following religious notions of purity or minimalism. However, a good standard must be explicit as much as possible. Having millions of optional fields with ambiguous meaning is worse than not having these fields at all. HTTP status codes are a good example of this as there are hundreds of them, but applications only understand a few because others have ambiguous meanings and software doesn't know how to handle them. XMPP is also cited as an example of over-engineering, with millions of extensions and features that aren't widely implemented due to vague definitions or poor design. Slush warns against over-engineering payment protocol.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:35:36.121424+00:00