It also results in a 33% byte overhead on top of the additional CPU and memory usage involved in actually pulling out and decoding base64 on the client side, an

It also results in a 33% byte overhead on top of the additional CPU and memory usage involved in actually pulling out and decoding base64 on the client side, and it screws up caching. What should be a quick reload of this page results in the transfer of that 8MB all over again, and takes very nearly as long as the original load. There is no universe in which this was wise.