Sparklines and data URLs
While reading Joe Gregorio’s posting on implementing Sparklines in Python, I found a reference to data: URIs, which is a way to encode immediate data in the URI itself, rather than requiring another retrieval. While only supported by everyone except IE (gee, how often have we said that?), it could be interesting for embedding small graphics in an XHTML document, and reducing the load on the remote server.
Sparklines, by the way are word sized graphics, and are a concept created by the talented Edward Tufte.
This entry was posted at 1:35 pm on 26 April 2005 and is filed under Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Definately not a new thing, but somehow I missed it. Thought I followed the RFCs reasonably well, but this one slipped past me.
I was thinking it’d a great thing for images that are used just once in the document, like Sparklines. Not necessarily a good thing for much else, though.
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This idea is in fact quite old, inline data is defined in RFC2397.
Last year, I wrote a python script that inlines all files into a single HTML to have a good archive format (no more directories of images and stuff). Needless to say, it was too large, since most images tend to be used more than once and the base64 encoding increases the size even more.
Still, for small images used only once, it is quite workable.