> And I am totally against this. I agree for human / interactive input. But for automated things, be as strict as you can be, and hard fail on anything else. Specs are there for a reason, and not adhering them creates compatibility issues.

Totally agreed on this. When a human inputs a name with a trailing space, trim it for them. Or when they input a phone number with funny dashes, remove them.

But when an API does this, it means the API client is simply incorrect. Incorrect requests should be rejected. Don't leave it up to the server to try to interpret it, this just leads to incorrect behavior.