All of this data is transferred in binary form, which is why you sometimes see the 'Downloading' icon spinning when you're on a website. The web server responds by sending back the requested page (plus all of its associated files) as well as additional data that tells your browser how to display the page. This request contains information about your browser and what pages you have visited on the site. When you visit a website, your computer sends a request to the web server. To start, let's discuss how binary data is typically transmitted over a website. For that data to be transferred, it needs to be represented in a way that the computer can process. In the computer world, communication happens in binary (0's and 1's), but people typically communicate in much more complex forms of data, such as images, GIFs, and text. In these cases, Base64 encoded strings may be necessary since they always use only 26 letters from the English alphabet and ten digits from the Arabic numerals (0-9). For example, some operating systems limit filenames to 8 characters with no spaces or special characters. It is also often used when there are limitations on the characters that can be used in a filename for various reasons. It's primarily used to store or transfer images, audio files, and other media online. What is Base64 encoding?īase64 encoding is a way to encode binary data in ASCII text. To understand this, it is necessary to know the basics about Base64. And indeed, today, there are a few nuanced reasons why Base64 should still be used. Most of the limitations that were solved by Base64 encoding have been bypassed. Since then, web browsers have become incredibly efficient at transferring a vast number of files over a single connection.

This eliminated the need for an additional round trip that the browser required for each of the files. With Base64, this problem could be circumvented by using an already open HTTP connection to deliver images embedded directly in HTML or CSS.

Therefore, a very image-heavy website had to join a queue of requests and wait until the previous ones had finished. Web browsers used strict limits on the number of simultaneous connections they could send to the server.

This article explains why the suggestion to encode in Base64 and include it directly in your HTML needs to be differentiated and is long outdated in most cases. This is a common technique for compressing and transmitting data, as it takes less space than plain text and can be used in different contexts. Do you want to optimize your images and website performance? Looking for help these days, you still come across blogs that suggest image Base64 encoding.

Base64 to image