Taken together, Feynman's "bending over backwards" and the "principle of charity" constitute a philosophy along the lines of "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". It's recently become fashionable to blame this principle for some sort of percieved flaw in the Web, but I wonder if a world where web browsers failed to render a entire page on so much as a misplaced </p> would really have been better. After all, it would be a shame if we lived in a world where people only listened to your opinions if you formatted them a certain way, wouldn't it?
Often, I find requiring to format my ideas in a certain way has revealed problems with those ideas I'd not yet considered. For instance, if a theist was required to frame God in the context of provable science, they would realize how many holes exist in their logic.
