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Currently, the RFC for data: URLs (RFC 2397 at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397 ) omits the maximum length for a data: URL. For developers to be able to safely use data: URLs, developers need to be gauranteed a "minimum maximum" length of data: URLs. Since RFC 2397 does not specify this minimum maximum length, and since many user agents already implement multi-megabyte data: URLs, the HTML spec should set a "minimum maximum" length of data: URLs. For example: "A user agent must accept data: URLs of at least XYZ megabytes in length."
In general HTML5 doesn't set any minimums, and indeed explicitly allows browsers to have arbitrary minimums. There's no guarantee that a browser will support a multimegabyte file of any kind, let alone a multimegabyte data: URI. Indeed the host machine might only have a few hundred kilobytes.
IE8 currently only supports data: URLs up to a maximum of 32KB (including any necessary encoding) which imo is severly limited. (source: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=575 )
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