The Plastic Manifesto describes the principles that guide the design and development of PLASTIC. Got comments and contributions? Add them to the Plastic Wiki.
A simple solution which does the right thing nearly all the time is better than a complicated one which does the right thing all the time.
The design of the PLASTIC system and messages should place a low burden on authors who wish to make their applications PLASTIC-compliant.
The astronomer should have a suite of tools at his disposal, each of which does one thing well, and can be composed according to his needs.
Developers are more likely to produce tools that do one thing well if they can easily out-source their secondary concerns to other tools.