OK, OK. We get the point. The example did not work in Internet Explorer but it DID work in EVERYTHING else. Hmmm..
I sat down and did some more research and found that yes, the RFC for embedded data dating back to 1998 has never been implemented in any version of Internet Explorer.
So we have to go back to the old way of doing things, make the browser go back to the CGI to use resources to read LDAP to pull a bit of binary data. I think we can do this but cut down on the resources this would use. We have already figured out how to encode the data in a url so why not call a a teeny, tiny CGI that will take the URL data and return it back to the browser as binary data?
Brilliant!
In this case I think this tiny CGI will be completely written in C which will mean low overhead and fast execution without any supporting DLL's. Is this a workaround for Internet Explorer? I like to think of it of a work around for all browsers that do not support the standards (cough.. cough.. Microsoft)..
For the standards based browsers out there, we will still use the data encoding so those folks can take advantage of this Internet innovation.