JTC1/SC34/WG1 Liaison Report: Zip Document Container Profile

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

On 2013-06-17 I attended a meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 WG1.  

WG1 had recently proposed a Committee Draft for an International Standard Document Container File - Core specification.  The Working group reviewed the one comment that was received from review of the Committee Draft.

DCF Core is essentially a profile of PKWARE Zip APPNOTE 6.3.3.  The idea is to omit all proprietary portions and handle up through Zip 64.  The one comment was on the fact that there are two ways to support Unicode in the file names and descriptive comments.  It is not clear what action will be taken about that.  It would also be valuable to exclude Extra Data units except for the ones required for Zip64 and also the one defined for OOXML OPC.

I reviewed the DCF Core before going to the meeting.  As far as I can tell there is no problem in supporting that in future ODF specifications.  I don't know if timing is such that ODF 1.3 Packaging can be intercepted, although that could be useful.

BEYOND CORE

I think it is clear that the the more interesting developments will be beyond DCF core to other matters, such as the means by which relative IRIs are use to cross-reference among components within a package.  That came up in another context, and I'll report on that separately.

 - Dennis