BufferView is a wrapper around the DataView class from the Typed Arrays specification: https://www.khronos.org/registry/typedarray/specs/1.0/ DataView has a minimal and awkward API. BufferView improves the API by keeping track of the current offset and allowing the specification of a default endianness. BufferView also adds UTF-8 encoding and decoding support. I've been thinking about ways to read and write multiple values at a time, and am considering implementing methods like Python's (and Perl's) pack() and unpack(). If I get more ambitious, I may try to make BufferView work with binary strings or with Node's Buffer class. Right now this code is mostly untested. But see the example in the test directory: it lists the contents of a zip file. Note that Firefox 4 does not support DataView. But you can emulate it with https://github.com/davidflanagan/DataView.js