<snippage>
...
</snippage>
> OB Future discussion:
>
> As we are entering this information culture age I expect to see a rise in
> the craftman. People who have to do specific tasks will be making thier
> own tools that they themselves craft to do the job best as they see fit.
> The concept of one tool that has anticipated your needs and you can do all
> your work in (Microsoft Office for example) will be replaced with tools
> that allow you to build the correct tool to do the job, such as perl,
> applescript, open doc, and the like. The industrial age goal of factories
> that press out identical products will make way for more of a individually
> crafted paridigm.
<delurk>
Been thinking about this exact topic lately, as I've been starting a new
job as a web master and general all-around multimedia guy at this ISP.
I'd been doing some HTML'ing and images and such for this company on the
side while I was at school the past year, mostly just so they could get a
feel for what I could do. Back then, I was using Adobe Photoshop for
images, and Emacs for all my HTML.
Finally got home for the summer to work for this place in earnest... and
now I'm suddenly in charge of web projects ranging from an site for an
entire mid-sized MIchigan city, a gym, the ISP itself, and a few other
things that all have to be done yesterday.
Well, spent most of my first 2 weeks here just getting tools together.
Thought maybe there were some neato keen things out there that would make
my job easier. Tried NS Gold, Hotdog whatever, and a few other
things... MOst of that was wasted time. None of that stuff even came
close to filling my tool specs. Kinda crappy, because the worthless
"learning curve" invloved in getting past the quirks of all the different
software could have been used in writing the raw HTML I already knew.
Thankfully, I'm a geek as well as a multimedia guy and I know c++, perl,
and a few other languages. (And I just took a course in MS Visual C++.)
So, I found the source to a dirty litty HTML preprocessor called HSC
somewhere on the net, modified and compiled it for all the disparate
LINUX, WinNT, and Win95 machines we have here... coded some perl... and
BINGO, I put together my own custom set of webmastering tools for
creation and maintenance.
Lets me do #includes like in c programming, do macros, automatically
figure out height & width attributes... all sorts of pretty things. Have to
use makefiles and geeky linux commands, rather than the pretty Win95
buttons, but I'd rather just train my fingers to spew out a few cryptic
lines of commands than search through menus and WinHelp... Hell, maybe
if I get some free time I'll code it all into a Visual C++ interface and
call it Visual HTML or something. =)
But I worry that if I go to another job like this with a different
hardware configuration, that all my tools I've just built will be defunct
because they'll wnat me to use something else. But the more I think
about it, the more I think that, the fact I was able to MAKE exactly what
I wanted in the way of tools for all this... that it doesn't matter if
these particular tools follow me. I have the ability to adapt to the
systems and adapt the systems to me, so if I go somewhere else I can
develop tools all over again, and do it faster each time I need to do it.
LIke my fave computer science prof keeps telling me, real computer
scientists don't care about the hardware platform, they don't care about
the language... they go to the next level of abstraction where they can
translate their concepts about what the machines should do, independent
of environmental specifics. And it seems this next generation of tool
craftsmen (women?) are in the same spirit, since they should be able to
transcend all the specifics of operating system, programming language,
and hardware and software to make the machines do just what they want
them to do, even if it means getting their hands dirty in code.
I think that's the way it'll have to go... because now, I think too many
ppl just waste too much time playing with configurations of other ppl's
software before they can even START producing and creating. Ugh...
Anyway...
</delurk>
-- Leslie Michael Orchard (aka Dionnus, Talien) |"The mountain stood exalted in orchard@cps.cmich.edu dionnus@industry-dm.com | its place. So love will take http://www.industry-dm.com/~lorchard | between its hands a face..." Boredom is a Fatal State. |(Robert Frost, "Moon Compasses")