Bellylaughs Amid Technical Complexity

Recently I’ve been up to my eyeballs in HTML5 and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Not exactly bed-time reading. So imagine my surprise today when I read an article on SVG that had me laughing out loud. Here’s one of the milder examples:

Space travelers encountering new species should not necessarily think that stealing a dictionary and plying an informant with single-malt scotch will automatically produce a Rosetta stone.

The author is David Dailey. He’s a professor of computer science at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. The article is Why is SVG going to be REALLY BIG?. Dailey presented the paper at the SVG Open 2009 conference held from October 2-4 in Mountain View, California.

Here’s a taste of the main message:

In short, the fundamental metaphor of SVG for the expression of human meaning is closer to the realm in which meaning exists (at least in some abstract mathematical sense). SVG has not suffered from the setbacks that millenia of bad assumptions about how to communicate thoughts have saddled onto speech, text, hypertext and, hence, HTML.

Those of you with philosophical inclinations will likely be engaged by the article. All of us can take heart from the hope that HTML5 and SVG may open new opportunities for deeper understanding of complex policy issues.