Nested Elements, CSS, and Russian Dolls

As I was writing up the last post, I had several thoughts flitting through my mind that comprise this rather spontaneous post.  First, I have been trying to learn HTML and CSS in hopes of writing a website and I was having a particularly rough time solving how to compensate for horizontal adjustment of the webpage in the browser’s screen.  I finally stumbled upon the realization that if I put the entire website in a single compartment, using <div> elements, all of a sudden I was working with one object upon the background of the larger html backdrop instead of a multitude.  That realization did not come easily, which is perhaps why it is still on my mind, but I was reminded of it when I was I was thinking about Placcius’s system of note taking.  At first it seemed analogous to bytes on a modern hard drive but as I thought more about it, I realized that analogy could not work because of the re-scalability of a hard drive compared to the wooden closet with fixed dimensions.  No matter how Placcius tried, he would have never been able to fit more notes in his scrinium than the internal volume of the space would allow.  But with a hard drive, the ability to hold information is not dependent upon the physical dimensions of the space so much as it is the components that comprise it and the system that runs it.  With this, like in CSS, information is less about the space it takes up and more about the nested elements in and out of it.

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Action is Eloquence (Part III)

As the question of discriminatory influence in results lingers, I would like to redirect thoughts to what Michael Witmore wrote in one of his recent posts.  In it, he speaks  about a text as being “massively addressable at different levels of scale”, such as through genre, lines, or single words or even through different modes such as a phone book dress or text tagging.  I am mainly reminded of his article because the texts that I have been looking at are addressable at mainly levels of scale but the results garnered from these texts are also, themselves, massively addressable.  As I noted in the last post there are an infinite variety of notes that I could make on any one of the diagrams that I can make.