There is binary and text, though. Many bit sequences aren't valid in a given text encoding (such as UTF-whatever) and so trying to use them as text is an error.

There is binary and text, though. Many bit sequences aren't valid in a given text encoding (such as UTF-whatever) and so trying to use them as text is an error. I understand what you mean, of course text can be represented and treated as binary, and the inverse often as well although it isn't necessarily true. Even in Windows-1252, where the upper 127 characters are in use, there are control characters such as null, delete, and EOT which I'd be impressed if a random chat program preserves them across the wire. I also don't read an implication that ASCII couldn't be converted to b64