- From: Elliott Sprehn <esprehn@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:32:40 -0400
- To: "João Miguel Lopes Moreira" <multi.jmlm_1970@hotmail.com>
- Cc: www-html@w3c.org
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 11:37 AM, João Miguel Lopes Moreira > > Instead of having only HTML: > IMG SRC="data:image/gif;base64,ZXYetc..." > > Having also HTML: > IMG SRC="data:.gif;base64,ZXYetc..." File extensions are really meaningless in the context of the web. The MIME type is the standardized way to determine the format of a file. File extensions may also be mapped to entirely different formats on different machines or on the same machine, or the machine might not even use file extensions. For instance .m files are used by both Objective-C for implementation files, and by MatLab for code files, and probably by other things as well. Many websites deliver HTML, images, scripts or CSS without a file extension, and nothing prevents you from mapping .awesome to image/gif on your server. So using the extension in the <img> tag wouldn't make sense at all since the extension is really meaningless. What's important to the browser is the mime type. In the event you load a file from disk it's up to the operating system (and the UA running on it) to determine the type of file. Ex. <img src="file:///foo.awesome" title="actually a GIF"> The browser should, using the OS facilities, figure out what kind of file this is. If the OS depends on file extension then of course this might not load correctly, however maybe it uses some kind of file metadata (like classic Mac OS, and somewhat OS X), or it uses the *nix "file" command to do an analysis. The behavior, though, is totally platform specific. It should be noted that the IETF specified the standard for Data URIs (which is what you're talking about), so it's not like the W3 could change what you want anyway. <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397> - Elliott
Received on Friday, 10 October 2008 19:33:20 UTC