Depends on your perspective. Within a single connection, the most flexible protocol adapts to the least flexible one, but the flexible protocol wins more: it gets to connect, which is more important than the details of how you connect; you just need something you can both agree on. But the flexible protocol will be able to connect with other inflexible protocols, which the inflexible protocol can&#x27;t.<p>Easiest example: HTML. Browsers are far more lenient towards bad HTML than they should be according to spec, because it lets them display more websites. Inflexible browsers lose to flexible ones.