RE: [office-comment] ZIP specification (Part 3, Draft 11)

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Alex,

Thanks for your comment concerning the authority of
<ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/doc/appnote-970311-iz.zip> as well as
the difficulty of accessing the site, which now appears to require a
password.   

It appears that a stable, authoritative source is more suitable for
normative reference and profiling for application to ODF Packages.  It seems
appropriate to look again in regard to ODF 1.2 Part 3 for Packages and also
for potential corrigenda for earlier ODF versions.

I have not found a relevant issue in our collection of past comments and
issues.  Consequently, I have opened a JIRA issue on this topic at
<http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-2082>.

 - Dennis


Further observations:

1. Although the proprietor of the format, PKWARE, offers authoritative
versions here <http://www.pkware.com/support/zip-application-note>, they
tend to be replaced arbitrarily.  The APPNOTE, now at version 6.3.2, has a
number of interesting provisions, some of which (such as Appendix D) are
quite relevant to application for ODF Packages.  There are considerable
changes in organization and content from earlier versions, such as (2)
below.  Some material in 6.3.2 also clarifies previous versions, such as
specification that the historically-supported character set encoding is IBM
Code Page 437 and a special flag bit is now defined to signify use of UTF-8
and Unicode Standard 4.1.0 or later.

2. On the other hand, the only archived version of an authoritative PKWARE
APPNOTE is version 6.2.0 of 2004-06-20.  This version has been preserved,
<http://www.pkware.com/support/application-note-archives>, in order to
provide an authoritative reference for a certain ECMA (and now ISO/IEC)
standard.  It would be interesting to see if this would suffice as a
normative basis for application to ODF Packages.

Do you have any observations on what appears most suitable?  

I favor (2) because it is preserved, but there may be improvements in (1)
that would be valuable to rely upon were that version archived and preserved
in a similar manner. In any case, once the differences between the versions
are understood, I daresay there will also be need for a restrictive
profiling to a normative level that suffices for ODF Packages.  I suspect
that careful technical analysis may be required in to arrive at a
well-defined approach.  I think the profiling needs to be addressed in a
separate JIRA issue.



 - Dennis

Dennis E. Hamilton
------------------
NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability 
mailto:Dennis.Hamilton@acm.org | gsm:+1-206.779.9430 
http://NuovoDoc.com http://ODMA.info/dev/ http://nfoWorks.org 



-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Brown [mailto:alexb@griffinbrown.co.uk] 

Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2009 10:03
To: office-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [office-comment] ZIP specification (Part 3, Draft 11)

Dear all,

The reference for the ZIP spec is

ftp://ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/doc/appnote-970311-iz.zip

Does this URL work for anybody?

More generally, is a pointer to a file on a uu.net ftp server (owner:
Verizon Business Global LLC) really adequate for a normative reference
here?

- Alex.

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