Pro and contra of images encoded as data URI for performance purpose (undead-seo.blogspot.com)

I've always loved this method. I think partly because I went through a phase where I was obsessed with those waterfalls which illustrate your webpage loading (like the one here: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/c3jfDt/http://tumbledry.org/... ); used to take a look at what goes on when I load a page of my website.

I'm of two minds on this, part of me thinks that 88.8kB is an enormous page for the three paragraphs of text on that "about" page, and the other half gave up and loads giant 2x images by default on my homepage because I didn't want to deal with two copies of every size of an image (I know, I know). Also, my site gets very little traffic, so nobody cares.

Anyhow, two minds.

At least two of these 'Contras' seem naively addressable (that browsers don't cache them and that crawlers don't decode them).

If we continue to put low value images in these base64 encoded images we won't encourage crawlers to take them seriously.