Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

I'd hardly say "readily". Hex I can read by eye; base64 I would use a program for, even if it's a five-minute one-off hack. (I can write a rudimentary base64 unpacker in fifteen minutes; I know because I once did. Fifteen minutes would be unlikely to be enough time for me to decode more than a few tens of bytes, without computer assist.) It's conceptually almost identical to base64: it's a base-64 representation, representing three octets of binary data as four encoded characters. The major differences are probably that uuencode has a length field on each encoded line and uses a different set of 64 characters. "man 5 uuencode" on your friendly neighbourhood NetBSD box should explain it - I'll be happy to send the manpage (nroff input or formatted output, as desired) to anyone who wants a copy. If it's a choice between base64 and uuencode, I'd say go with base64 - it's more resistant to mangling by non-ASCII systems. If you're willing to commit to ASCII, btoa might be better - it uses base 85, expanding by 4:5 rather than the 3:4 expansion produced by base64 or uuencode. However, the only reason I can see to use base64 instead of hex is a desire to expand by only 3:4 instead of 1:2, and in my opinion that verges on penny-wise and pound-foolish given the fundamental goals of this archive format. As Sellam writes, /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B