Data URIs

By  on  

We're all familiar with traditional URI protocols like https, http, ftp, and file, but data URIs have become a large part of our online strategy. We can use them to display images, the Mac camera and webcams, and more. But what if we simply want to use a data URI to convey basic data?

Typing a data URI shouldn't be difficult, and it isn't. As someone that works on the Firefox DevTools Debugger, I'm often typing out data URIs to illustrate problems. The format is:

data:text/html,<body class="blah"></body>

We're all so ingrained to use protocol://subdomain.domain.tld addresses that data URIs look foreign...but they require the least amount of resources to express content!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Google Font API

    Google recently debuted a new web service called the Font API.  Google's Font API provides developers a means by which they may quickly and painlessly add custom fonts to their website.  Let's take a quick look at the ways by which the Google Font...

  • By
    PHP / MooTools 1.2 Accordion Helper

    The MooTools Accordion plugin seems to be the plugin that people seem to have the most problems with. It's an awesome plugin, so I can see why so many people want to use it, but I think that may be part of the problem.

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!