I've coined the term Design Choices to encompass all flavors of design contracts because it emphasizes an oft forgotten fact that design is not a checklist of "best practices", but rather an interacting set of choices. These choices balance tradeoffs between competing design patterns that are made for the benefit of an entire system rather than isolated classes.
Marker Interfaces are defined as those that have no details, only a name. This idea has long been used in Java via standard interfaces like Serializable, Clonable, RandomAccess, etc. However, their use has typically been limited to those interfaces intended to be explicitly verified at runtime, normally via "instanceof".
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