Also, PGP decided
to design itself around binary data, to make encoded files smaller,
and then added the ASCII-Armor.
I certainly wish that PEM had done the same. The signature process
of course needs to be applied to the canonical ASCII text so that
it will be definitive, but the application of Lempel-Ziv or some
other form of compression _before_ encryption would have produced
significantly smaller messages.
As it stands presently, a user would have to convert from say EBCDIC
to ASCII, then compress, then sign, encrypt, and convert to ASCII for
compatibility with increasingly-obsolete networks, and then compress the
ASCII again for better throughput if possible. Ugh!
Bob