Web Law: Less Equals More
Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror posted a great post entitled The Principle of Least Power. The concept was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, to summarise, Powerful languages inhibit information reuse. For example, weather information encoded in XML can be manipulated and processed very easily, where as if it were encoded in Java, the information is locked and therefore cannot be searched or sorted by any external application.
For more information see The W3C Document concerning The Rule of Least Power