With the help of bitcoin wiki I learned that every bitcoin address stands for a number and that shorter addresses are valid just because they happen to start with zeros, and when the zeroes are omitted, the encoded address gets shorter.
Source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address
I am not sure I fully understood everything. First of all, I suppose the part about a "bitcoin address stands for a number" refers to hexadecimal digits?
Other point I'd like to clarify:
How the zeros can appear while address is generated in the first place? I thought that zeros (along with l, I and O) does not exist in Base58Check encoding at all.