Not so hot on the heals of Tom Scott's development manifesto for the BBC Nature site I thought I'd dig out the old BBC Programmes (@programmes) manifesto. It took a while to track down but eventually turned up in a dusty folder with the title dogma.html...

The timestamp says 14/10/2008 but I think it existed as some post-it notes on a wall several months before that. I know it predated Yves' arrival, so also predated any of the Linked Data work. Which was really just a logical extension rather than any new principles. Anyway, here it is:

/programmes believes:

  1. in one web
  2. in accessibility for people
  3. in accessibility for machines
  4. it's a service, not a product
  5. in designing from the domain model up, not the interface down
  6. in being RESTful
  7. in open standards
  8. in open data
  9. in linked data
  10. in fixing the data, not hacking the code
  11. in links before pages
  12. that the real value is in the links to other domains
  13. in designing for the browser in the browser

Like Tom's list we didn't always live up to these standards but they kept us (mainly) honest. I seem to remember we also kept a 'hack log' to keep track of anywhere we evaded our principles for the sake of expedience. Wonder what happened to that?