Zen of Web

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Revision as of 21:13, 24 January 2011 by 140.147.245.83 (Talk)

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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
  • Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber
  • 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.