RFC 2397 has been around since August 1998 and Iā€™m just learning about the data URL scheme today. Perhaps browser support for it is new? Basically data URLs allow you to embed data, like images directly in an HTML page. Data URLs remind me of Fred Lindbergā€™s old idea (circa 2001) of ā€œmailing the webā€ by freezing web pages as email with MIME attachments.

Itā€™s fun to be learning new things about HTML/HTTP: technologies that I thought I was familiar with already. Perhaps Iā€™ve been out of web development for long enough to fall behind. The other day I learned about iframes from my friend and sometime coworker Jason and was similarly blown away by something new under the sun. iframes are esentially the same things as regular frames but for the browser user they donā€™t see separate panes. Useful for scrolling panels inside of pages and other things Iā€™m sure.

I guess this is all part of the web renaissance that is going on now, spurred on by Googleā€™s forays and investment in javascript and xml. Itā€™s really interesting to see how a big player like Google can redefine what is acceptable technology to rely on in web applications. For years Iā€™ve avoided doing too much in javascript since it was a headache to get it working across different browsers, at least for this programmer. Now javascript is on my list of things to learn more about.