Thursday, August 09, 2007
Should there be an ISO ZIP standard?
Rick Jeliffe discusses why there should be an ISO standard for ZIP. It's really surprising that there isn't, given how many different formats ZIP compression is a component of. The PKWare definition of ZIP is merely referenced by ODF and Open Office. The specification looks pretty good, though of course a fine-toothed comb is necessary to find any ambiguities. It designates some fields as "Reserved for use by PKWARE," which is undesirable in a vendor-neutral format. The description of spanning and splitting is rather ad hoc; spanning requires "writing each segment to a unique removable medium" and giving them all the same name. I'm sure there are other things that could be cleaned up.
Labels: ZIP
# posted by Gary McGath @ 10:02 AM 
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I think ODF points to Info-Zip instead of PKWARE's appnote. ODF's reliance on Info-Zip is of concern as it is unclear as to what is implemented across operating systems; the Info-Zip note is over 10 years old and ODF seems underspecified in regards to packaging (IMHO, anyway).
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