Few days ago I was experimenting with a nifty technique of embedding images in web pages by base64 encoding them first and then using a standard known as Data URI Scheme, which basically defines a method of assigning a ‘src’ of an image tag as a base64 serialized string, like this: background-image: url("data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABkAAAAUBAMAAACKWYuOAAAAMFBMVEX///92dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnZ2dnYvD4PNAAAAD3RSTlMAACTkfhvbh3iEewTtxBIFliR3AAAAUklEQVQY02NgIBMwijgKCgrAef5fkHnz/y9E4kn+/4XEE6z/34jEE///A4knev7zAwQv7L8RQk40/7MiggeUQpjJff+zIpINykbIbhFSROIRDQAWUhW2oXLWAQAAAABJRU5ErkJggg=="); Although this technique could save some server round trips, however Microsoft ver. (IE < 8). does not support this scheme even though its a standard, which then makes this technique unfavorable to use as its not cross browser.