inline image with base64 & css

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inline image with base64 & css

sebbothebutcher

5:53 pm on Sep 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

i know that one can inline base64 encoded images in html the following way:


<img src="data:image/png;base64,<BASE64 STRING>" />

as i want to keep the .html filesize as small as possible, i want to inline an image in css, so that i just have to write


<img class="someimage" />

and see a picture...
i've experimented with something like


<style type="text/css">
.someimage
{
 background-image:url(data:image/png;base64,<BASE64 STRING>");
}</style>

but, as i am not an expert in css, my experiment failed.
anyone who could help me out on this one?
thanks in advance

Robin_reala

6:37 am on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

Well, aside from the fact that there's an extraneous " in your code, which browsers are you testing this in? IE doesn't support data URLs.

Span

2:44 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

Here's a test image: [perlmonks.org ]

sebbothebutcher

3:25 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

i'm using firefox, and base64 encoded images work fine, but not with css... any other suggestions?

Span

3:40 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

Using the Perlmonks base64 code, does this work for you? I'm seeing the image in my FF on Mac.


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<style type="text/css" media="all">
div {
width:100px;
height:100px;
background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAGQAAABkAQMAAABKLAcXAAAABlBMVEX/AAAAAP9sof2OAAAAIUlEQVR4nGNgGAWjgFTw//8HJF4Dg8CI5aGGxCgYBcQBAMULD/2Zt2wmAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC);
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>Hello world</div>
</body>
</html>

sebbothebutcher

3:57 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

this works for me too... just one more question... where do i have to put the "alt" text for the IE users?

Span

4:45 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

alt text.. hmm.. that's impossible with background images. Maybe conditional comments?


<!--[if gte IE 5]>
<p>Sorry, your browser doesn't support base64 encoded images.</p>
<![endif]-->

The code or text between the comments is only visible for Win/IE users with IE5 or up.

sebbothebutcher

5:53 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

okay, that should do the trick!

thanks for your help, everybody!

Span

8:16 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

I think this is really interesting. Putting images on a page without an actual image.
But, I encoded an 2.371K jpg into a base64 string and that string appeared to be 3.192 K. And that was only an 80x80 thumbnail. So in the end, apart from the fact that there's no support in IE, I don't think this will be any faster or use less bandwidth. Less hits and no hotlinking worries..

sebbothebutcher

11:12 pm on Sep 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

i didn't expect the size to become smaller...
i only "need" it to have an html page people can copy anywhere without having to worry about missing images, etc.

nevertheless, thanks for your help!