Re: A format for packaging (was: CSS: Extended tiling. Proposal)

On Thursday 2004-05-06 22:43 +0000, Bert Bos wrote:
> On Thu, 6 May 2004, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> > Bert Bos wrote:
> > > it seems there is a technology missing: maybe browsers should support
> > > some format that is in fact a ZIP or TAR of a compound document...
> > 
> > See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/signed-scripts.html -- 
> > this talks about putting an entire webpage in a signed JAR, but the jar: 
> > protocol works for any ZIP/JAR file, signed or not, in Mozilla.
> > 
> > It's not a performance winner quite yet due to the way caching of the jar file 
> > is (not) done, but we're hoping to fix that...
> 
> Looks to me that Mozilla should talk to KDE a bit :-) KDE uses the tar
> format to store a Web page with its dependent styles, images and scripts.
> It uses the extension .war (Web ARchive) and assigns it the unregistered
> MIME type application/x-webarchive. The purpose is archiving, not signing,
> but those are not incompatible.

The use of JARs for signed scripts dates back to Netscape 4 (1997) [1].

> Why does Mozilla use a protocol jar:, rather than a MIME type?

The JAR URL syntax comes from Java 1.2 [2].  It's been called broken
[3], but the alternative given in [3] doesn't allow relative URLs to
work whether or not the files are in a JAR.

-David

[1] http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/signedobj/trust/index.html
    http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/signedobj/jarfile/index.html
[2] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/net/JarURLConnection.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Jul/0005.html

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >