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Clarify Permissive-In / Strict-Out Naming Policy in Guidelines

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Domain
api, documentation

Research direction

Open graph/GuidelinesGraph.md at the Naming section and review the existing Input/Output Handling guidance. Add the requested Permissive-In / Strict-Out section covering accepted variants, canonical outputs, and documentation of both; done means the guidance is clear and consistent with the surrounding naming policy.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Microsoft API Guidelines needs an update to clarify the Permissive-In / Strict-Out naming policy for API request and response.

https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/vNext/graph/GuidelinesGraph.md#naming

Add a section under Naming Conventions Input/Output Handling
Recommend that APIs:

  • Accept a broader range of inputs (e.g., case-insensitive, lenient formats)
  • Emit consistent, canonical outputs (e.g., strict casing, normalized values)

Encourage documentation of canonical forms and accepted variants

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