I only recently stumbled across what's got to be the most outlandish scripting hack I've seen in a long time. Jacob Seidelin tells of how he managed to stuff text into a PNG image, then get it back out with the <canvas> getImageData( ) method. What's neat about it? Mainly the free compression you get with the PNG format. For example, when Jacob put the 124kb Prototype library into PNG format, it shrunk to 30kb. Of course, it makes for an awful-looking image (see above), which one might think of as a degenerate case of steganography, i.e. embedded data in an image, minus the image.
The trick doesn't work for all browsers, since you need canvas for it to work. And it's kind of pointless given that you can use gzip instead. But it's kind of neat in that it opens the door to browser steganography, embedding of private metadata, and potentially lots of other cool things.
