[whatwg] API for encoding/decoding ArrayBuffers into text

[Joshua Bell]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 1:14 AM, Cedric Vivier <cedricv at neonux.com> wrote:

>
> For this, base64 encoding/decoding is typically used (so that it
> doesn't conflict with the XML or JSON container) and thus more or less
> efficiently implemented in JavaScript (just like we had to
> encode/decode strings in JS to/from XHR a while ago).
>
> Would it make sense to support encoding="base64" in this API?


Having implemented a library that handled both text encodings and
base16/base64 encoding, I can offer the opinion that the nomenclature gets
very confusing since the encode/decode semantics are reversed.

binary_buffer = encode(text_content)
text_content = decode(binary_buffer)

vs.

binary_buffer = decode(base64_data)
base64_data = encode(binary_buffer)

When you try to unify these and have the same API accept "UTF-8" and
"BASE64" encodings by name it's difficult to keep track of which of
encode/decode you want; one will seem backwards. (This is one advantage of
the atob()/btoa() API naming approach.)