The other proposal

[robert_weir at us.ibm.com]

sc34wg1study-bounces at vse.cz wrote on 10/19/2010 12:51:52 PM:
> 
> I've put forward a proposal Bob.
> Lacking no other.
> 

Lack no longer, Dave.  I gave three proposals last week:

http://mailman.vse.cz/pipermail/sc34wg1study/2010-October/000019.html

And here's another one:

I'm adverse to reinventing the wheel here.

Remember, the scope of the original proposal include as a first 
requirement:

"Specification of a minimal compressed archive format suitable for 
immediate use with the document standards named above".

The mentioned standards included ODF, OOXML, Widgets, EPUB.  All of these, 
in their latest versions, use the ZIP format according to the ZIP 
Application Note.

Note the phrase, "suitable for immediate use".  This could be interpreted 
in many ways, none of which suggests to me starting from basic principles 
and producing a new compression/archiving format from scratch.

I'm certainly willing to volunteer my time to help this WG develop a 
reasonable proposal that harmonizes some of the archiving conventions 
currently in use by these other formats.  There is some good to be gained 
by doing this. But I have a high degree of certainty that any attempt to 
propose a packaging specification that diverges significantly from current 
industry practice in this area will fail its NWIP ballot.

So I'd suggest that instead of speculating about patents and inventing a 
new format, that we try to collect and compare what has actually been done 
by other standards in this area. 

0) Give URL's to the ZIP Application Note and the packaging specifications 
for ODF, OOXML, Widgets, EPUB, etc.

1) What are the ZIP Application Note "features"?  We should enumerate the 
major ones.

2) For document formats that use ZIP, what ZIP features do they require? 
We need to know this matrix.

3) What additional conventions do the other standards layer on top of ZIP? 
 manifests, .rel files, mimetypes, etc.?

4) What are the commonalities?  What are their differences?  Of these 
differences, do any contradict each other, e.g., are mutually exclusive?

Anyone have a wiki they can give us access to?

This should all be rather simple once we start analyzing the actual 
specifications.


-Rob