Worst Bug or Shortcomings in a Standard?

Alastair asks: "Just curious what the Slashdot crowd thinks are the worst bugs ever to creep into a standard? For mine, the various security vulnerabilities in WEP would make the grade. Also perhaps the lack of a protocol field in HDLC, and which most implementations added in a non-compatible way. I'm thinking here about bugs which result in partial or total irrelevance of the standard itself, as opposed to just a lack of interest in adopting it."

Comments

SMTP has no sender authentication.

[OneDeeTenTee]

'Nuff said.

"Referer"

[typhoonius]

This is stupid, but it bugs me that we're stuck with "Referer" in HTTP.

XML. For existing at all.

[baadfood]

Sure a well defined markup language is nice but really, people seem to loose all rational sense when it comes to XML - It cannot be used in a project without the project becomming "XML"? Scripting languages have been capable of processing all manner of free form text files in the past but somehow XML is necessary for interoperation? Why do people somehow think that XML encapsulated data will be small and quick to parse and are then suprised when it isn't? Why are they so fucking proud when their server can generate some trivial number of XML packets per second? What nutjob actually thought XML is easy to read? And what is the difference between a node an an attribute? Really?

Use of floating point for date/time

[AndroidCat]

Microsoft, in their infinite wizzbang, uses a floating point representation for date/time in their OLE types, with the date (days from x) in the integer and time in the fraction. That's fine until you have to do math like timezone conversions. If you convert a local time to GMT then to someplace else and back, frequently your time is now off by 0.0000000001 seconds. That adds excitement to comparing two times, especially when only one has been converted to and from.

It's not a huge problem to avoid, but unless you're draconian about using standard safe time math routines, it'll bite you .. eventually .. when you least expect it .. at a customer site running Martian Standard Time at local midnight. (Which will still be a bad hour for you to get a call no matter where it is.)

And all because someone thought it would be pretty nifty to use floating point. Don't they teach the inherent dangers of round off or truncation errors in school these days? (And before someone automatically jumps on MS, with all the UNIX standards, what are you using? Is it safe?)