And you're naïve if you think ASCII suffices for English. I wouldn't give you ½¢ for an OS incapable of handling Unicode and UTF-8 even if you told me every language other than English were mysteriously destroyed. Going back to ASCII is 180° from what would enrich English-language text.

> You only need one sentence to explain why ASCII isn't sufficient

Nitpick: ASCII is sufficient when you consider that Base64, despite its 33% overhead from representing 6 bits with 8 bits, makes life easier for certain classes of software.

Base64 is an encoding for representing bytes[0] in ASCII.

That doesn't help you represent text unless you already have an encoding for representing text in bytes (e.g. UTF8).

[0] Octets if you want to be pedantic

What I was alluding to is, I often convert any binary data, including text, to Base64 to avoid dealing with cross platform, cross language, cross format, cross storage, cross network data-handling. Only the layer that needs to deal with the blob's actual string representation needs to worry about encoding schemes that are outside the purview of the humble ASCII table.

Base64 encodes sextets. The mapping from octets to sextets is mostly settled for set of three octets at a time, but the situation for lengths not divisible by 6 is a mess.

You still need an encoding to represent non-ASCII characters like ë or 木. Base64 is no help at all there