Is it safe to use to display images?

Question

I\'ve learned that it\'s possible to embed an image in an HTML page like so, instead of linking to a separate image file:

Answer 1

Yes, this is safe - all major browsers support the data URI scheme.

One downside is that if you use the same image a number of times in the page, it will be encoded several times vs downloaded once.

Another is the size limit imposed by some browsers (IE 8 only allows up to 32k).

You can also use this in CSS to mitigate the download issue.