PUBLIC MARKS from decembre with tags base64 & dev

t's a good practice usually only for very small CSS images that are going to be used together (like CSS sprites) when IE compatibility doesn't matter, and saving the request is more important than cacheability. It has a number of notable downsides: Doesn't work at all in IE6 and 7. Works for resources only up to 32k in size in IE8. It saves a request, but bloats the HTML page instead! And makes images uncacheable. They get loaded every time the containing page or style sheet get loaded. Base64 encoding bloats image sizes by 33%. If served in a gzipped resource, data: images are almost certainly going to be a terrible strain on the server's resources! Images are traditionally very CPU intensive to compress, with very little reduction in size.

data: URI Generator The data: URI scheme allows you to build URLs that embed small data objects. data: URIs are supported by most modern browsers except for Internet Explorer. The lack of IE support is holding back widespread adoption of data: URIs, but they are still very useful in a couple of specific areas such as embedding graphics and other data items in Greasemonkey scripts. You can read more about data: URIs and see some examples of their use, or use the generator below to create your own. data: URIs are defined in RFC 2397.