Thursday, May 29, 2008

rant: the HTML rant tag



No! I am not ranting. I swear. Me? Rant? No way! Wait a minute. I am ranting.


I am not sure that the HTML rant tag has anything to do with machete. Or, maybe the HTML rant tag will be the only product of the machete language. Anyhoo, while cruising the web for steampunk and of course whiling those time-consuming right turns, got Gigablasting neuromancer and bumped into the Sarcasm mark, as in <sarcasm>Oh really?</sarcasm>, which has lead me back to the HTML Rant tag.

<rant>Aaaaaaagh! It's already defined in urbandictionary.com. Oh well. There is nothing new to define. Which means there is only one way to go forward: go backwards. Get out the machete and start hacking out keywords.</rant>

In the words, or at least the sig, of Michael J. Mahon:
"The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."

Friday, May 9, 2008

Why be modular? Carving out a niche


Yes, we can carve the chair out of a block of wood. Our tool of choice is machete, so naturally carving might be a way of using this tool. But, machete is not actually about using the tool, machete is about intuition. The machete usually only comes out when there is so much real foliage blocking us from where we get to where we need to go.

Are we carving a chair? Why are we constructing a chair? Is constructing a chair a good of example of what we need to construct? Do we need to construct anything at all? Perhaps, we have everything that we need already. Perhaps, we need less. Perhaps, we have way too much just like when there is too much foliage and it's blocking us. Perhaps, it is time to use machete and hack out some code.