Re: FYI: gzip/zip in the browsers...

On 22/12/2015 15:53 , Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-12-22 at 18:09 +0000, Daniel Weck wrote:
>> A browser-native "zip" API would be useful 
> 
> Note that gzip and zip are totally different beasts.
> 
> Not only are they different compression algorithms, but zip is an
> archive format (multiple files in a single archive) and gzip is stream-
> based (a single file).
> 
> The gzip compression is the one used by Web servers for HTTP, not zip.

Yup. Also, an API for zip is not "just" a matter of exposing the format.
There is the issue of the API itself of course, but more annoyingly
there are intrinsic problems with zip as a format. Just to pick one
issue, the paths in it could be URI-like (with escapes) or IRI-like. You
need to pick one (or pick an algorithm for chosing one). In order for a
useful Web API to be exposed, it ought to be made interoperable. The
widgets spec gets some of the way there, but it's still work.

-- 
• Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
• http://science.ai/ — intelligent science publishing
•

Received on Tuesday, 22 December 2015 21:04:00 UTC