From an article by Henri Sivonen :

Draconian error handling creates an unstable equilibrium in GameTheory terms—it only lasts until one player breaks therule. One non-Draconian XML5 implementation in a key client productand the Draconian XML ranks would break.

(Discovered through Mark Pilgrim ,specifically his firehose .)

Applications to XHTML are left as an exercise for the reader.

There are two sorts of secrets in the world: known secrets and unknownsecrets.

A known secret is something that people already know exists; forexample, your root password is a known secret. Keeping a known secretis simple: you just don't tell people your root password. You haveto guard known secrets against inadvertent disclosure (it's alwaysembarrassing to type your root password into the wrong window), butthat's mostly it.

(I am ignoring the possibility of deliberate attacks against the

One of the great not quite arguments in the Python world is betweendocstrings and comments, specifically which one you should use inyour code. My answer is that I use both, although more comments thandocstrings, but I use them for different things.

My comments are primarily written as internal documentation; how afunction operates, why it operates that way, the high level logic andstructure of the code, and so on. Docstrings, when I write them, areexternal documentation, covering things like how to use