Dear visitor: thank you for dropping by. If, by happenstance, you’re visiting this blog using any Internet Explorer version, I have another message for you:
Internet Explorer does not support
data:URIs. That’s the reason you cannot see some images here.
To put it briefly: an URI denotes a way to access data of some kind. The most popular one is http:, which instructs concerned software that whatever follows should be accessed by means of HTTP protocol. There are other schemes, among others file:, https: and rdf:. data: URI tags ensuing text as binary data. It is most frequently used to embed tiny images in a web page, saving a DNS query and an HTTP roundtrip per image. Response times per image are reduced, more pronouncedly so for smaller ones.
data: URIs were first described in IETF standard RFC 2397 (august 1998). The fact that this standard is not supported by Internet Explorer, not even in its latest version, IE7, hasn’t come to my attention till recently.
You should really have a look at other browsers (Firefox, Opera; I am a happy user of both, the former on my PCs under Windows and Linux, the latter on my mobile phone). Don’t do it for this blog —you aren’t losing much, really— or for those geeky data: URIs, which aren’t so popular after all. But you should be safer, and you’ll help foster diversity in browser’s ecosystem. And diversity propels (technology) evolution.
