Comment by pudquick
data: URI URLs aren't supported in it, it has nothing to do with the size / length of the QR code
For example, this self-contained webpage: <html><body>Hi!</body></html>
encoded is: data:text/html;base64,PGh0bWw+PGJvZHk+SGkhPC9ib2R5PjwvaHRtbD4=
If you paste that into a browser, it will render "Hi!". Very short and easy.
But if you encode is as a QR code, it won't work in this situation.
You don't even need the base64 encoding for dataURIs: just throw the text payload after mime-type and a comma:
This is also a valid self-contained HTML document. You have to add `;charset=utf-8`, if you need to go beyond ASCII, and for some browsers watch for URI-encoding of some syntactically significant characters (like `#` and `%`, `?`).Base64 is indeed good to be "safe" and/or somewhat 'conceal' the payload, but it also makes it larger by 1/3 (every three bytes of input become four characters of the base64 output). So taking the risk some devices would not like raw "ASCII dataURI", the QR of the backrooms QR could shave off 738 bytes.
BTW, this is my "HTML sandbox" for testing stuff in a browsers that I summon daily through keyword bookmark to test simple stuff: