I agree! But I also think that encoding, in terms of how popular an encoding becomes, is not purely concerned with "efficiency" or "space optimization". There's

I agree! But I also think that encoding, in terms of how popular an encoding becomes, is not purely concerned with "efficiency" or "space optimization". There's something more metaphysical or at least artistic going on. It's about aesthetics, to some extent I think. The universe wants these little symbols to be born/representing things - if you wanna go that far, haha! :) b64 succeeded because it's...kinda beautiful. It's not the most "efficient", or whatever. But it looks gorgeous. Enough variability in appearance, to keep each little (or long) slug interesting looking. No weird font issues with symbols replaced with opaque, error-looking boxes. Just the raw beauty of English language and its alphabet. There are more efficient encodings still (like the unicode base 65536 or whatever), well designed, hyper optimized -- but they don't really take off. I think one thing is aesthetics. And...what you say - KEEP it SIMPLE! :)