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Keeping Design Simple

A post on Slashdot on comparing the design of the Indian EVM (Electronic Voting Machine) with Diebold's machine, highlights the importance of system design being kept as simple as possible.

Tim Berners-Lee has a short, but important list on his 'Principles of Design' webpage that re-iterates ideas that we all know, but often ignore:

• Simplicity ("Keep it simple, stupid!")
• Modular Design
• Tolerance ("Be liberal in what you require but conservative in what you do")
• Decentralization
• Test of Independent Invention ("If someone else had already invented your system, would theirs work with yours? ")
• Principle of Least Power

A complete list of design issues and architectural principles that guide W3C's thinking about Internet protocols (including Web service protocols) is here. It also has a proposed 'Roadmap for Web services'.

On a humorous note, a comment on the same Slashdot post - "These Indians are crazy- They build their own electronic voting machines, and outsource their Prime Ministers"- this being a reference to the Italian born Sonia Gandhi's party winning the largest number of seats in the Indian parliament.