> but also implies you can't encode ordinary ASCII text into base64. I don't think it implies that at all. Text isn't binary. Text can be encoded in binary,

> but also implies you can't encode ordinary ASCII text into base64. I don't think it implies that at all. Text isn't binary. Text can be encoded in binary, and there are different ways to do it. ASCII, UTF-8/16/32, latin-1, Shift-JIS, Windows-1252, etc. Many can't encode all text characters, especially languages that don't use the Latin alphabet. The fact that you have to ensure you're using the correct encoding when processing text from a binary stream is proof enough that text isn't binary. Python before 3.x allowed you to treat binary and text as equal, and it often caused problems.