Why use data URI scheme?

Question

Basically the question is in the title.

Many people have had the question stackoverflow of how to create a data URI and problems therein.

My question is

Answer 1

A good use of Data URI is allowing the download of content that have been generated client side, without resorting to a server-side 'proxy'. Here are some example I can think of:

• saving the output of a canvas element as an image.
• offering download of a table as CSV
• downloading output of any kind of online editor (text, drawing, CSS code ...etc)