Good Citizen

(Maybe a pattern, or may be not...)

We are importing data, or interacting with other systems using a format or a protocol that has a strict form. Although the strict form exists, there are many data providers or collaborators that don't adhere to the strict format (maybe because they are using a variation or are just producing erroneous output).

Therefore our system pledges to be a GoodCitizen. It is as tolerant as possible of external sources and yet produces output for other collaborators only in the strict form of the format or protocol.

Increasing the number of GoodCitizens will increase the likelyhood that the average data file, or protocol interaction will be in the strict form.

--some guy

Better yet, it increases the chances that the average interaction will work. ;->

See also: LinguaFrancaPattern

This sounds a lot like the problems faced by the XML syndication crowd right now. There are tons of folks producing erroneous RSS feeds, either embedding invalid characters (HTML, entities) in the item descriptions or titles, or even having faulty information in the feed (e.g. description contains author + date instead of a description, no title given, etc).

As it stands most people take the GoodCitizen approach. But IMO this is only a partial solution: You can either declare you will accept bad markup, in which case people have no incentive to correct themselves, or you declare you will not accept bad markup, in which case people will route around you and use a different aggregator (like ScriptingNews or OreillyMeerkat?).

Similar kvetching can be found on the Syndication mailing list: http://www.visa2003.com/citizenship.htm , and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/messages

--DaveCantrell