When programming with bytes, a lot of your programming time is spent converting from hex format into byte format and then back again for debugging and testing. If your encryption package has the option, you may as well work consistently in hex format all the time. You then only need ...

More serious problems can arise from the use of encodings. Developers often overlook the fact that encodings do not limit the set of characters that XML supports. Every XML document supports the full Unicode character set (16-bit or 32-bit characters in XML 1.1). Encoding XML documents can reduce their size, but ...