Lecture Week 6- Carving Up The World

This weeks lecture was really interesting. Really liked having some philosophy thrown into the course breaks something I enjoy doing with something equal enjoyable. Anyway to the point, today's lecture examined humanity's innate need to categories everything and anything. So the actual meaning of the Cascading in CSS refers to the ability the code has in the CSS. If the code specifies in the body (being the largest tag) the font-family and font-size then that will apply to all of the style sheet because it was placed in the body. It now does not need to be specified anywhere else.

So, carving up the world was the idea we focussed on. We have created conventions that we just take for granted such as clothes, books, which side of the road we drive on and cuisine. These are all things that we have developed over time and its these conventions that we let define us. The same thing happens with creating interfaces we have a general idea what a web-page should look like because of all conventions that have been developed  since the internet's creation. However we have a fantastic opportunity at this current stage of the internet. While books for instance have been finished in design the internet's has a different set of affordances and limitations to the real world. Thus we are able to constantly develop new ideas for this technology as the physical limitations do not apply. As Michael said we can now move a hundred documents with a single drag where you would not be able to lift a hundred documents all at once in the real world.

A designing point, Michael made 'Sometimes conventions are worth following, until you are comfortable to break them.' I thought was really cool because what that meant was when we felt comfortable with the design conventions that there is always a place for us to create new ones. This is especially exciting as the idea that one of our designs could replace a current convention was mind-boggling.

Also, while looking at machine tags I wondered whether this what what I needed to incorpotate the search bar option in my web page. I have been investigating hopefully I can find something to get it running before the due date. Heres hoping.