Important: This whitepaper applied to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, and has been removed. For current documentation, please visit the corresponding page in the Internet Explorer SDK:
data Protocol Data URIs offer Web developers the opportunity to embed small external resources (such as CSS files or images) directly into a URL on a Web page. The primary use case for data URIs is the encapsulation of a binary file inside of a URL. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers' data URI implementation attempts to balance security with functionality.