Zen of Web

This is a collaborative effort to document the subtleties of building applications on the Web. The idea took inspiration from the Zen of Python. Please feel free to edit/add items below:

• Default to open
• Less is more
• Everything is broken
• View the source Luke
• Keep it simple
• Nobody knows if you are a dog
• Pave the cowpaths
• Small pieces, loosely joined
• de facto usually beats de jure
• No permission needed
• Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.
• Follow your nose
• Everything is intertwingled
• The world is your audience
• You GET what you need
• You can't always GET what you want
• Resource-oriented (vs. service-oriented)
• Tagsoup tastes good
• A resource can be anything
• Caching is your friend
• Be the authoritative source for your own data
• Pass by reference not by value
• Know the difference between structured and unstructured data
• Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions
• Push your data to the widest appropriate scope
• Reuse components and services
• Media types are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

If it turns into a useful list it could be turned into a collaborative code4lib2011 lightning talk or something. Some of these were heisted from a similar list by Jon Udell.