Subject: Re: UUencoding for file transfer over the net

From: Ed Lai <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 90 14:44:00 PST

The issue is not sending binary file over the net. If that was the only issue
uuencode or any equivalent utitlity would do it. The problem is that different
machine uses different internal code for Chinese so that what is sent over
can only be used by machine of the same type. What we need is something that
is as easily as reading news/mail in English now.

That was why 'zW' was proposed. There has been a report on CCNET that 'zW' is
for Mac only. Nothing can be further from the truth. The history was somewhat
like this. There was a open letter written in Chinese from the Mac and it was
posted in binhex format (the most standard format of unloading Mac File) in
soc.culture.china. With that anyone with the Mac Chinese system should have
no problem looking at it. If the interest is for Mac only, the issue is
completely resolved and no work need to be done. At that time I said we should
give it a wider audience so that it can be read by people with other type of
machine. So I proposed an encoding scheme. Not much happened but a few month
later the topic was brought up again and [email-masked] proposed
putting 'zW' in front of each line so that it is easier to use it in terminal
mode and hence the name 'zW'. He had successfully generated article from
CCDOS and Byx (the encoding format actually is closer to CCDOS internal code
than Mac internal code) and I read it on my Mac. I have post document from the
Mac and he read it in his IBM PC. There was a big-5 document posted on the net
and he uudecode for me, I then convert it from big-5 to Mac internal code and
post it back again as 'zW'. Subsequently terminal program was developed so that
the Chinese charater is read directly off the screen. It is not perfect but
it is definitely a workable solution.

On the other issue of how many character are needed for research oriented
Chinese computing. We should look into the CCCII code. Actually it probably
make sense to use CCCII in place of 'zW', but we do not have the conversion
table so it take a lot of effort to make it a practical system. CCCII is used
mainly as exchange code (even PRC are leaning toward using it as exchange
code), but I had been told that there are system in Taiwan that use it directly
(don't ask me which, I don't know). CCCII is the effort of the "Chinese
character analysis group in Taiwan, their major goal is to collect all Chinese
character ever known to have been used, so their collection is bigger than
any dictionary. Also their handling of variant form of the same character is\
interesting. Since they use three byte code they have a lot of code space to
burn, so they assign the variant form in such a way if you want to treat all
variant form as the same character you just need to mask off a few bits and
then all of these variant form would map to the same code. I believe that
there is a US standard that use the same structure as CCCII (but not necessary
the same code table as CCCII) that is used in the East Asian Libraries.

/* Disclaimer: All statments and opinions expressed are my own */
/* Edmund K. Lai                                               */
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