Comment by jart

Didn't really understand the linked blog posts, but "Parse Don't Validate" sounds like another way of stating Postel's Maxim, which is to be liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you send. I generally try to follow that principle with the way I've written the redbean web server. When it comes to things like URLs and HTTP messages, there's a whole bunch of characters in each field that the RFCs say aren't allowed, but the parser code is still able to work fine even if they're permitted. For example, the RFC says ` isn't allowed in a path, but why should the parser care? It's not like that's a syntactic element. There's no reason to consult a map of validate characters, which slows things down, until you want to re-encode the parsed URL. The re-encoded version will turn the parsed ` into %60 since that's what you might send back to the network, and that needs to be perfect, since you don't know if the other end has one of those strict as a matter of policy parsers, that ignore what's possible and enforces only what's legal.