[puffoflogic]

Yes and no. The author was making the point that each new LIT relied on an input-dependent branch, whereas when you're decoding XOR [a,b,c] the branch is on the pre-decoded length of the instruction. LIT could be encoded like this but isn't.

[sedatk]

Got it, there's no "LIT w/length" instruction in LZSS, so it's logically a new compare-and-branch every time a literal character is hit. I hadn't regarded it as a performance-wise argument, but size-wise for some reason.