Simple cli utility to convert single HTML files to data URIs
To get a data URI version of the original data URL specification:
npm install -g dataurify-html
curl -s 'https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397' | dataurify-html
Remy Sharp has made a wonderful tool called inliner which can be very helpful when bundling your application as a data URI:
npm install -g dataurify-html inliner
inliner 'https://remysharp.com' | dataurify-html
It is really difficult (and sometimes impossible) to copy & paste long data URIs to the address bar. It is also impossible to pass arguments larger than getconf ARG_MAX to a console command, which on OSX means no arguments larger than 262144 characters.
On OSX, if your data URI is shorted than about 255 kB, you can get past the open command not detecting data URIs as URLs by passing the URI through osascript:
osascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to open location "'`curl -s 'https://github.com' | dataurify-html`'"'
If you have a longer data URI, I believe your best option is to create a web page which contains the data URI, and open that. At the time of writing both Chrome and Edge have disabled top level navigation to data URIs due to phishing security concerns, and other browsers might follow later, so that means location.href = dataURI and <a href="dataURI"> might not work for you.
Iframes with a data URI source still work in all browsers, and are expected to stay like that for a while, so that is one good option:
export FSTART='<iframe style="width:100%;height:90%" src="'
export FEND='" />'
inliner 'https://remysharp.com' | dataurify-html | perl -pe 'chomp; $_ = $ENV{FSTART}. $_ .$ENV{FEND}' > framed.html; open framed.html