Principles, Laws, & Quotes

A collection of principles, guidance, and wisdom from the web.

Sanderson's Success Formula src

Success is a function of the value you bring to others, so a pursuit equally fueled by love but which did nothing to help or to entertain people just wouldn't have had a chance to work.

Meyer's Principle of Ubiquity for the Websrc

Ubiquity, even over Consistency.

Principle of Least Powers src

Choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Inclusive Design Principles src

It's about designing for the needs of people with permanent, temporary, situational, or changing disabilities — all of us really.

Keith's Law src

Javascript should only do what only Javascript can do.

Connecting the Dots src

The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along.

Principles for Reflective Web Archiving src

  1. Attempt to save as much material as possible
  2. Performed by archivists and/or institutions outside the community
  3. Focused on the universal over the personal
  4. Concerned with preservation and restoration rather than recirculation

Evans' Law of Web Archiving src

Any faithful reconstruction of a website will inevitably fail to exactly recreate the original

Ferdinandi's Lean Web Principles src

  1. Embrace the platform
  2. Favor small, modular tools
  3. Build a web for everyone

Stewart's Principles of Precision src

  1. Complexity often masquerades as sophistication; simplicity requires confidence.
  2. True mastery lies not in conquering all tools, but in wielding the fewest with precision.
  3. The server that renders HTML has solved more problems than the framework that promises to.
  4. Each abstraction should simplify something; when it doesn’t, we’ve abstracted too soon.

Verou's Principle of User Effort src

In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam. Treat user effort as a currency. To create a product users love, design the tradeoff curve of use case complexity to user effort with the same care you design your pricing scheme.

Troy's Law of LLM Usefullness src

The more innovation - or "newness" - the approach requires, the less these LLM tools can help.

Brok's Wisdom src

The Nature of the thing is more important than the Form of the thing.

Hacksaw Ridge

With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don’t seem like such a bad thing to me to wanna put a little bit of it back together.