I appreciate the author building a more efficient alternative to base64, but I had to laugh for a moment at the suggested use case.

Using an alternative to base64 encoded data for web pages and node is a horrible idea. If I came across a code base using that I would scream. A lot. None of my tools work with it, and now my browser has to run a bunch of js for something that's normally native and very fast. Its a 1-2kb savings per page that's going to make somebody jump off bridge one day.

More terrifying is that the JavaScript community is so fascinated by shiny objects that thousands of people are going to use this. I'm not sure if it's more funny or terrifying.

Anyways, this encoding is still useful if you need to pass data between legacy systems. I've used html escapes and ASCII85 before to get around annoying old stuff that doesn't use Unicode many times