Synergy (is the way things have to be)
While rummaging around, I ran across a pointer on Scoble to new work by Edward Tufte on "Sparklines" in a preview chapter of his next book, "Beautiful Evidence". Sparklines are basically little "more than words" graphlets, little concentrated bombs of data in an otherwise textual context.

What clicked was that when looking at the examples, I realized that these were quite possibly a good use of data-urls - they're small, they run in-line - and I'd been looking for an excuse to play with PIL (the Python Imaging Library) and it works pretty well - - though in practice I'd need to (1) have a better handle on using them in sentences, like words (2) have actual data, instead of a gaussian random stream (3) have some way to make them work in other browsers; maybe ascii art in alt tags, maybe javascript that detects IE and "fakes" it manually [though that is better suited to a bookmarklet, I think.]

Something to ponder, at least. Might be particularly useful for PDA (ie. small-screen) interfaces, too...