I'm not presently doing anything with LZString (other than playing around with it); I was merely pointing out how one could easily get LZString to work with 8-bit IO if need be. As to why one would want/need to do so, interfacing with existing code/libs that expect 8-bit IO is one reason. For example, I have several existing Base85 (et al) transcoders that operate on 8-bit IO (be it string or array); 16-bit IO from existing compress/decompress won't work as-is. I could write extra wrapper code to work with/around the 16-bit chars, but changing 2 numbers was faster/easier/cleaner (especially since I'm just evaluating and don't want to invest much time/effort...yet anyway). Just as your own code tweaks those values to align on 6-bit boundaries for Base64, one can similarly tweak them to align on 8-bit boundaries (e.g. for Base85). Naturally one would not want to use 8-bit when multibyte is a possibility, but there are numerous scenarios/standards/encodings where 8-bit values are guaranteed.