I don't agree with that. IMO removing the zlib, hex, and base64 encodings was a good thing. While an argument can be made that they're technically "encoding",

I don't agree with that. IMO removing the zlib, hex, and base64 encodings was a good thing. While an argument can be made that they're technically "encoding", they're really outside the scope of the problem the encode and decode methods were meant to solve.