Tuesday, January 20, 2009
XML in ZIP
One of the biggest trends in file formats in recent years has been the packaging of XML in ZIP. ODF and Office Open XML (properly I should say OPC, which is the foundation of OOXML) are the two best-known examples. Rick Jeliffe offers an overview of some variants in wide use (not all of which are strictly limited to XML), with a discussion about how to find common denominators among them.
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
