Sometimes you like to think that you pretty much know everything there is to know about URIs and web browsers. I learned something today that I had absolutely no idea about before. The magic data URL protocol.
It’s defined in RFC2397 as a way to include immediate data in a URL.
For example the following defines an inline GIF image in a base64 encoding:
<IMG SRC="data:image/gif;base64, iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADsAAAAvAQMAAABnrCB9AAAABlBMVEUAAAD///+l2Z/dAAAAvElE QVQY03XQwQ0CIRAF0E9I5GLEClwrkVasxKU07GRK2CMHAn4GdXdNJCS8hDDzB7SxBFvI3PFsLYWW r5CpRe47FtfgKwTZVvhiBMVUuGwJPODECSpucMmzDi5w6IgOJ0xEsjgiEGLiGTOxgKs3zTxNRyFs RyWc5iG8IgKTIgFBIcCsYKERPrPMHoX1FIz6D2WF/Xm+rHi3+DZNG4R9Qhw+OI3w/LAxTsEU7UAY yAhJZ1/0TxR9dxjeNnkBOFrkvJphu9wAAAAASUVORK5CYII=" ALT="Atlassian Dude">
Which, if your browser supports it, will render thusly:
I only discovered this because Yahoo’s excellent YSlow extension for Firebug suggested replacing small, externally referenced images with data protocol representations.
Pretty neat.


Comments (4)
By Kishore Senji on August 12, 2007 /
By tmjee on August 12, 2007 /
By Alain Moran on August 13, 2007 /
By Guy Fraser on August 13, 2007 /