Hacker News Reader

Well, tbh, I don't know the reason, I can only speculate. It is meant to encode pure binary data (cbor) and not to be human readable or URI or anything like that. It is specifically designed for QR Codes. I read through some Github issue [1] just now and as far as I can tell, it is more or less a design oversight, which might be remedied by a later version.

[1]: https://github.com/ehn-dcc-development/hcert-spec/issues/64

View on HN

> It is meant to encode pure binary data (cbor) and not to be human readable or URI or anything like that.

Well the reason to care is to avoid QR decoder quirkiness, otherwise you should probably just use the binary encoding.

> I read through some Github issue [1]

According to a comment near they end they were originally going to try to pack everything as a single base 45 bignum, so that half explains it. But not why they'd stick with 45 characters when changing that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com