[MarioMan]

I've wanted to abuse this to support a static site "hosted" entirely from a QR code, but I haven't found any QR scanners that interpret the data URI as something to open in the browser. And without wide support, that project is hardly worth bothering with.

[myfonj]

Yes, the sad part of this otherwise brilliant feature is how it got butchered "for the sake of security". Reportedly crooks abused dataURIs as hosting for malware and self-hack schemes. Understandable: it sounds "better" to embed the whole phishing page in link inside e-mail, than to operate some ephemeral server serving the phishing page, that could be blocked on firewall, DNS, or whatever.

So in effect, currently no evergreen browser lets us for example do a top-level navigation to dataURI document. The only way you can get top-level dataURI in your browser is either to type it or open from bookmark. Firefox for example has super cool feature to open "Open this frame to a new tab", what only produces new tab with the dataURI in the url bar, but we have to finish the navigation by pressing Enter or in there.

URL shorteners also do not like dataURIs. Also understandable, since they probably do not want to be "hosting". I have one ancient tinyurl link back from days top-level dataURI navigation worked and tinyurl supported it [1]. This document was able to modify itself :]

Ah, days of yore. I would really like to have a pref in browser's options give me (and other power-users) these "dangerous features" back, like "I know what I am doing and I will always check the URL of all pages, now give me unrestricted dataURIs."

[1] http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable-datauri