<article lang="&language;" id="data">
<title
>Data URLs</title>

<articleinfo>
<authorgroup>
<author
><personname
><firstname
>Leo</firstname
><surname
>Savernik</surname
></personname
> <address
><email
>l.savernik@aon.at</email
></address
> </author>
<othercredit role="translator"
><firstname
>Malcolm</firstname
><surname
>Hunter</surname
><affiliation
><address
><email
>malcolm.hunter@gmx.co.uk</email
></address
></affiliation
><contrib
>Conversion to British English</contrib
></othercredit
> 
</authorgroup>

<date
>2003-02-06</date>
<!--releaseinfo
>2.20.00</releaseinfo-->

</articleinfo>

<para
>Data URLs allow small document data to be included in the URL itself. This is useful for very small HTML testcases or other occasions that do not justify a document of their own.</para>

<para
><userinput
>data:,foobar</userinput
> (note the comma after the colon) will deliver a text document that contains nothing but <literal
>foobar</literal
> </para>

<para
>The last example delivered a text document. For HTML documents one has to specify the MIME type <literal
>text/html</literal
>: <userinput
>data:text/html,&lt;title&gt;Testcase&lt;/title&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a testcase&lt;/p&gt;</userinput
>. This will produce exactly the same output as if the content had been loaded from a document of its own. </para>

<para
>Specifying alternate character sets is also possible. Note that 8-Bit characters have to be escaped by a percentage sign and their two-digit hexadecimal codes: <userinput
>data:;charset=iso-8859-1,Gr%FC%DFe aus Schl%E4gl</userinput
> results in <literal
>Gr&uuml;&szlig;e aus Schl&auml;gl</literal
> whereas omitting the charset attribute might lead to something like <literal
>Gr??e aus Schl?gl</literal
> </para>

<para
><ulink url="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397.txt"
>IETF RFC2397</ulink
> provides more information.</para>

</article>

