Generating and parsing data URI's in Ruby

I'm fond of data-URI's (MDN Link). 12 years ago I reappropriated a tool that stored a webpage with its related resources in a Microsoft specific format and rewrote it into something that would store it in normal HTML where the related resources were encoded in data URI's. Recently the topic came up again at a project I was working in, where microservices are still a thing. And while discussing it with colleagues it seemed as if knowledge about this quite useful URI-scheme wasn't on top of everyone else's mind. Instead, the original idea was, we could upload the resource to S3, pass the link, download the resource from S3 at the receiving end, and then have some policy that takes care of deleting it… nah…

data-URI: The basics

This is the most simple data-URI:

data:,Hello%2C%20World%21

You [can open it in your browser](dat…

Pretty Persistent IDentifiers (PPID)

If you're into archival stuf, you've probably come across the concept of PIDs. PIDs help organisations attribute data to consistently identified objects. There are different PID-schemes. Books can be persistently be identified by their ISBN. In science, DOIs are popular to identify scientific articles. And there are plenty of other persistent identifiers.

What most of them share is the following: they need registration. And while that could be a good thing, I've seen well meant attempts at creating a PID where the central entity went rogue, links are dependent on some centralised resolver and it all falls apart.

The requirements

When I was tasked to create a long lasting QR label the requirements were clear:

• The basis had to be a URL (QR Codes can contain anything, but URLs deliver the best UX)
• It should have a fallback: the url should not be a meaningless string; it should at least contain an identifier i…