>After all, the internet runs on a foundation of buggy technologies, and it survives.
How the Internet is buggy?
How the Internet is buggy?
BGP is a "trust" system where you just assume your peers tell the truth and action their routing changes accordingly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking#Public_incidents
DNS has no spoof protection and due to UDP can be used to DoS third parties by mislabelling your packets and requesting large records.
SMTP has no built in way to verify the sender actually works for the domain it claims to work for (see SPF and DKIM as potential workarounds).
Everything is being worked on and improved. But the broken stuff is still a large party of the internet today.
Maybe more than anything, people abuse what the Internet is for. Hospitals running their patient records over devices on the public Internet (that are almost certainly full of exploitable security holes on some port, which is probably an Internet "bug" in how easy it is to just barrage all the ports on a machine to find some exploitable application if they aren't proactive with managing the security).
I would have agreed with you back when IE 6 was still a "thing." But these days with strict XHTML, CSS, for appearance/layout, and JS for logic we seem to actually be at a very good place for moving forward.
I'd even go as far as to say that XHTML/CSS and JS do a better job separating responsibilities than many programming frameworks I've used do.
Do I think they're perfect? No. In fact I hate typeless languages like JS. But it is "good enough."
So is money.
"life doesn't work perfectly, it just works."
You could say life works better than dead.
A simple example: there are some TCP/IP stacks where the urgent pointer indicates the last byte of urgent data, and some where it indicates the first byte after the last byte of urgent data. Obviously these aren't the same thing, and only one is correct according to the standard, but both kinds of stacks are (I think) still in use. We get around this by basically not using urgent data in our TCP streams.
One thing the Internet does show is that a system doesn't have to be perfect to be robust and incredibly useful. In fact, worse is often better in that way too. If IP were orders of magnitude more complex to deal with all its potential edge cases, it likely would not have been as successful.