MVC Data URI HTML Helper

I have recently been looking into web page performance and one of the things I came across is the Data URI scheme. When you reference an image in your HTML, the client needs to go and retrieve the image. This creates an HTTP request and adds to the time it takes for the page to load. What is the Data URI scheme - well, it is a URI scheme that provides a way to include data in-line in web pages as if they were external resources. Instead of adding a reference to your image as a path or URL, you embed the image directly into the document using a Base64 encoded string. The browser automatically understands the string and decodes it there and then - instead of retrieving it via an HTTP request.