Boxes and Glue

Donald Knuth was one of the first authors that I was fortunate to read trying to understand the arcanes of code. I bought the TeXBook, including commented source code, and tried hard to understand his marvelous writings.

One of the things that struck me was the beauty of the page layout algorithm he used: lists of horizontally laid out boxes (letters), which formed boxes (lines), which were disposed in lists of vertically laid out boxes (lines), and so on...

Glue was used to keep boxes together. Glue that could stretch little (between letters), or a bit more (between words, slightly more after punctuation), or even more (at the end of the line, for left aligned text, at the beginning, for right aligned text, in both sides, for centered text).

The magic combination of boxes and glue was a very general framework for describing one of the most difficult problems that mankind has faced: while today a chess program is able to win regularly over human players, page layout is still better done by hand than using a computer. :-)

Thinking out of the box

Boxes and glue are also a good metaphor for abstraction: abstraction is splitting the world in boxes, and bind them together using glue. Depending on the problem we are trying to solve, the boxing and gluing will be different.

I have cared about abstraction, rewritting and symbolic systems during my whole life. So I thought it was a good metaphor for this blog. Not by chance, during the days I was setting here the pure css rendering of the

Boxes and Glue

title, which I set up nearly twomore than four years ago, I came upon an entry by Stefano Mazzocchi, about embodied ontologies/taxonomies, one pointed by his recent entry about de-idealizing ontologies. This last one is key for my acceptance of the semantic web ideas, though I think his namespacing of ontologies is still missing the operational part, i.e., even a person handles different ontologies depending on the problem s/he is trying to solve. But it is a big step in the right direction.