why did computer science settle on base16 for compact binary representation over the doubly compact base32?

Question

For example colours #ff0000, Unicode points \u{003F} and others all use hex.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Base16 maps nicely to bytes. 1 byte has 8 bits and you need 4 bits for each hex (base16) character. So 1 byte can be written down as 2 hex characters.

For base32 you need 5 bits for each character and that’s just awkward.

You would have to split each byte into 3+5 bits and you really wouldn’t help yourself. You really don’t want to combine unrelated bytes together into a single number, so you wouldn’t really help yourself.