It's a valid argument, but I say it's merely an argument, not an argument that wins or should win.
But also, I say that detecting out of spec or unexpected input and handling it in any other way than crashing IS adhering to Postel.
Refusing to process a request is better than munging the data according to your own creative interpretation of reasonable or likely, and then processing that munged data.
I consider that to be within Postel to return a nice error (or not if that would be a security divulgence). Failing Postel would be to crash or do anything unintended.
Google’s results for “Postel’s law” and “Jon Postel” are fine. “Postel” is ambiguous, a fairly common surname, so websites of unrelated companies show up, and a disambiguating page on wikipedia that links to Jon Postel and several other people.
I thought the whole point of letting Google surveil your entire life was they would know that if you're interested in computing and networks, to the point of participating on news.hackernews.com, then they'd know that if you're searching for "Postel," you'd probably want Postel's law to be on the first page.
We're back at pre-1998 search, where we have to specify more and more context just to get results that aren't noise.
