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Good to know I'm not the only one who has done this! I once wrote a template generation tool that embedded its input configuration into its output files as base64-encoded gzip'd JSON. Worked quite well at allowing template regeneration.

For your trouble, you save some extra bytes with 85 vs 64.

With the added bonus of funny characters which are a pain to encode in JSON, XML and URLs. I guess I'll keep using using URL safe Base64, thank you.

Modifying the base alphabet is simple if there are a couple of problem characters.

I use 85 in json just fine without escaping overhead. Never tried for URLs or XML.

and then the webserver probably recompresses again via gzip.