Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!water!ljdickey
From: ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Posting binary data in binary form
Message-ID: <2022@water.waterloo.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 89 03:20:10 GMT
References: <6182@hoptoad.uucp> <271@logicon.arpa>
Reply-To: ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 40

In article <271@logicon.arpa> Makey@LOGICON.ARPA (Jeff Makey) writes:
|In article <6182@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
|>(Referring to a standard for sending databases over the net):
|>> =- Format can be ASCII or UUENCODED binary.
|>
|>We have two new versions of netnews coming out within the month -- C
|>news and TMNN (News 3.0).  I believe both of them are 8-bit-clean, that
|>is, the data part of a message can have any 8-bit characters in it
|>(including nulls and very long lines).  [...]
|>  ... we should consider simply sending binaries as binaries.
|
| [...] posting binary files in binary format is a bad
|idea for several reasons:

|   1) Not all machines have 8-bit bytes. ...
|   2) My terminal does strange things when it sees certain escape
|	sequences.  ...
|   3) Many sites will continue to run obsolete news systems for years. ...

I agree that binaries should be encoded into visible (graphic) characters.
UUENCODE is good enough for some.  However some problems arise when
files go through gateways.  The UUencode scheme includes the tilde (~),
and some EBCDIC machines still have translate tables that get it wrong. 
(Example: My most recent bout with this was in trying to send a file
to a friend in the UK, and we made the mistake of sending the files
through UKACRL.)  Another problem with UUencode is that the blank
character is used, and again, some EBCDIC software smashes trailing
blanks.  The scheme used by "BTOA" and "ATOB" avoids these problem
areas, and is more efficient, since it is base-85 instead of base-64. 

I would not object to doing some file compression before encoding.
At least one binaries groups on the net already have conventions like
this, using ARC and then UUE.


-- 
    L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.
	ljdickey@WATDCS.UWaterloo.ca	ljdickey@water.BITNET
	ljdickey@water.UUCP		..!uunet!watmath!water!ljdickey
	ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu