Subject: About "Pure GB" Transmission

From: Rupert Zhu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1992 13:06:13 -0500

As Yongguang Zhang pointed out, we discussed the possible choices
of coding and transmission matters in CCNET-L during early 1991. We carefully
considered the advantages and disadvantages of "pure GB" and "popular GB".

Popular GB:
^^^^^^^^^^^
Advantage: 1) This coding is most widely used inside/outside China.
           2) The work of technical support could be minimized if
              we adopt this scheme.
Drawback:  1) The files is binary and require preliminary processing (uuencode)
              before transmitting in network;
           2) The uuencoding step prevents on-line reading.  (one need to
              do uudecode before reading.)
           3) Uuencoding incurs an overhead of 35 percent in file size.

Pure GB:
^^^^^^^^
Advantage: 1) Direct transmission;
           2) Almost no overhead for transmission purpose.
           3) This may be the ultimate direction for Chinese communication
              in future.
Drawback:  1) Pure GB transmission is based on the assumption that
              a) all ASCII printable characters can be transmitted correctly;
              b) all Chinese characters can be coded using a combination of
                 two printable chars.  So the size of Chinese character set
                 could not be larger than  9025 (i.e., 95 * 95).
           2) Considering the possible enlargement of GuoBiao coding standard
              in future,  There seems no guarantee that the total number of
              Chinese characters will still remain within 9025.
           3) The currently existing schemes have not become a widely accepted
              standard, major Chinese wordprocessors do not handle pure GB.
              (So some preliminary processing like conversion may still be
              needed.)
           4) We (HXWZ editors) lack the expertise to judge the technical
              design of the current schemes.  No authoritative agency has
              made an evaluation on the topic.  We feel a little unsafe
              to go into it blindly.
           5) Using pure GB method will certainly require much much more
              work for technical support, which we cannot afford by now.

Comparing pure GB and popular GB schemes, we feel that the latter is easier
and much safer.  The 35 percent overhead in file size is tolerable for
now and in near future.  We are quite confident that this scheme can work
for a fairly long period, during which we are still waiting for the new
development on technology and standard.

To avoid causing confusions to thousands of novice user/readers, we intend
to keep the current scheme stable until a technically more advanced
scheme become mature and widely accepted.

The above is just my personal (non-expertise) opinions.

-- Rupert Zhu