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> As you may have expected, no images used here. Instead, an base64 string is used to create the patterned effect.

A base64 encoded image is still an image. Just from a syntactic point of view it pisses me off that people say this, it makes their accomplishment seem more interesting than it actually is.

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Yeah I was just about to lay down the same comment - this is just stupid. If I wrote an article called "all css images!" and it was just a base64 encoded image, would that get even a single upvote?

But don't completely disparage it. It saves an HTTP request to include it in the CSS. (Though typically it compresses 30% worse. For smaller images like this, that is not an issue.)

A similar "image-less" technique I've used is to generate the pattern in JavaScript using a canvas element. eg with canvas.toDataURL("image/png").

The JavaScript code to generate a noise pattern is often smaller than the inlined base64'ed content.

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