images on the web

[Michael Ströder]

Matt Nordhoff wrote:
> Matt Nordhoff wrote:
>> You could use data: URIs [1].
>>
>> For example, a 43-byte single pixel GIF becomes this URI:
>>
>> <data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FyH5BAEAAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw%3D%3D>
>>
>> They don't have universal browser support, but that might not be a
>> problem in this case.
>>
>> As for generating them with Python, I'm not sure... I just used Hixie's
>> data: URI kitchen [2] for the above example.
>>
>> [1] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397>
>> [2] <http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/data/data>
> 
> Oh.. As <http://bitworking.org/news/Sparklines_in_data_URIs_in_Python>
> shows, the reason I couldn't find a data: URI Python library is because
> they're utterly trivial to generate:
> 
> import base64
> import urllib
> 
> raw_data = create_gif()
> uri = 'data:image/gif;base64,' + urllib.quote(base64.b64encode(raw_data))
> 
> (And it's even simpler if you leave out the base64-encoding.)

The caveat with URL schema data: is that the amount of data to be 
transferred is significantly higher than including HTML tag <img src=""> 
in your HTML source and let the browser fetch the raw binary image data 
in a separate HTTP request (you also have to serve from your web 
application).

Ciao, Michael.