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Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

Some other random feedback: the short phrase makes me think that I should parse instead of validating. Might I suggest: "Don't just validate: parse"?

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The idea really is that parsing subsumes validation. If you’re parsing, you don’t have to validate, because validation is a natural side-effect of the parsing process. And indeed, I think that’s the very thesis of the blog post: parsing is validation, just without throwing away all the information you learned once you’ve finished!

I understood the article, and I see your point, but my main feedback is that when I read the title I assumed that you were going to describe some way where you would parse input without validating it.

FWIW, I don’t read that implication in the title.

If validation is necessarily included in parsing, then the title -- parse && !validate -- is impossible.

The title of the post says "don't validate," and so I initially expected it to relate to the mantra of being liberal in what you accept, etc.

One thing to bear in mind is that headlines are not prose, they are shorthand.

So you have to assume there could be missing words, since that’s how headlines work.

In this case there is a dropped “just”:

Don’t (just) validate: parse!

If the headline was “Parse, never validate” then I would agree with your reading. But “don’t” is pretty lightweight. I’m having a hard time thinking of a lighter discouragement word. Given that, I think it’s unfair to assume the strongest discouragement is implied.

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