Is encouraging binary encoding/decoding a good idea? Should it be so prominent? #6

I found the arguments at whatwg/html#6811 (comment) by @Kaiido somewhat persuasive. Basically, if you're encoding your bytes to and from a string, you're probably doing something wrong, and you should instead modify your APIs or endpoints to accept bytes anyway.

There are definitely cases where it's useful, mostly around parsing and serializing older file formats. But I'm not sure they need to be promoted to the language (or web platform).

Relatedly, even if we think this is a capability worth including, I worry that putting it on ArrayBuffer makes it seem too prominent. It makes base64 decoding/encoding feel "promoted" on the same level as fundamental binary-data operations such as slicing or indexed access. From this perspective something like https://github.com/lucacasonato/proposal-binary-encoding (with static methods) seems nicer in that it silos off this functionality to a separate utility class.