Old home week -- thinking outside the box

Howdy all!

I saw a bunch of familiar names on the mailing list of late and thought I should say hi. 

Ya'll might recall, from some years back, that I had done a thing [1,2] about how CSS (built for the world of text, as confined by the world of printing), being used as a layout model for SVG (built for graphics) was unfortunate. 

The handful (maybe I'm exaggerating) of people who actually listened, explained patiently to me that getting people to think beyond the hallowed confines of rectangles was far too radical a notion to consider by an august body interested in standards. 

Nonetheless, my belief that web science is bigger than web standards and that the field of combinatorics (employing theorems and the like) is more enduring than SVG1.2 or SVG2.n, has kept alive my interest in understanding and even cataloging rectangular thinking, as a sort of curious footnote to the current history of telecommunications. I just found out that Ron Graham [3], an old former co-traveler of mine from Alaskan days, was involved in this article [4] which talks about all the ways one can partition rectangles into rectangles. It represents, as such, a sort of encapsulated view of the structure of the domain allowed for page layout under the current regime. Many of those interested in the limitations of expressiveness currently allowed will find it of academic value.

If you want to look at cooler ways of tiling (I've been working hard) take a peek at [5].

Cheers,
David


[1] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/Parisien.html 
[2] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/TGW2014/RectilinearMold2.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Graham 
[4] http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~ronspubs/82_04_tiling.pdf 
[5] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/tiling/tilingNew.html 

Received on Saturday, 17 November 2018 12:59:04 UTC