A compelling use case for Base16b encoding is micro-blogs, where a strict character limit is enforced.
In this sample, Twitter is able to handle the entire "Larry" image in fewer than 140 characters.
Note: a bit of hackery was required to get this to work.
- Due to a deficiency in Javascript, the Twitter web client sees a single multi-byte character input as two characters. So a maximum of only 70 such characters may be entered this way. See this discussion for more detail.
- The Spaz desktop client, which depends on AIR, had the same problem as the Twitter web client. I modified it to use Base16b.trueLength() instead of the standard Javascript string.length property when validating the length of input is within the limit.
- Higher plane characters are not displayed properly in the Spaz client.
- I installed the LastResort font to allow the glyphs to be seen in the browser.
Twitter's API and transmission / display of higher plane characters work just fine.