Do you speak data: ?

If you’re running a decent browser you should be able to display this secret message.

See also the much cooler sparklines examples, based on Edward Tufte’s ideas.

I have started collecting bookmarks for this under the dataurl tag at del.icio.us (and sparklines is often related).

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 8:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to Do you speak data: ?

  1. Alessandro Vernet says:
    April 30, 2005 at 1:28 am

    Nice use case for URLs! Talking about storing data in URLs, what about storing XML? Try this one: http://tinyurl.com/5e9q7. And yes, the XML document that gets returned is 100% stored in the URL. How? Tinyurl.com expends the URL to a longer one that contains the XML document compressed and encoded in base64. The expended URL points to a site that performs the decoding and returns the XML data. You can give it a try (http://www.orbeon.com/ops/goto-example/xml-to-url) with your own XML documents.

    Alex

  2. Sylvain Wallez says:
    May 1, 2005 at 11:36 am

    The “data:” protocol has its own RFC (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397.txt) and its base64 form is a requirement in SVG, to allow embedded images in xlink:href attributes (http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/conform.html#ConformingSVGViewers)

    This makes me think… we should add this protocol to Cocoon :-)

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