I have a hard time understanding why one would care about such things. Just ignore additional query parameters you don't need and be done with it forever, what's the problem with that? Is it really worth writing a rant?
> In general, any laxness in actual implementations of a system can create a similar spiral of de facto requirements.
Those "de facto requirements" mean that writing something simple becomes inordinately complex because noone fixes broken clients. And you can't test changes because you don't have access to these broken clients.
It also leads to nasty bugs. For example, if you ignore extra parameters and provide defaults for others, now a misspelled parameter will silently fail.
The best example is how hard it is to write a browser. The standards are very complex, but it's magnified by the complexity of supporting "real," namely broken, HTML and CSS. That's contributing to the browser mono-culture.
Well, the alternative is that somehow you end with technology that no one bothers to use. Laxness allows to have multiple early, lazy implementations interoperate more or less correctly. Yes, in the later stages you end up with loads of technical depth and oligo- or mono-culture.
