Re: [xml-dev] Interoperability

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@rbii.com>]

On Friday 16 November 2001 01:28 am, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> 3) Packaging
> ----------------
> The other mechanism, and the one I think we need,
> is a simple file format for packaging all the resources
> for generic and value-added XML applications: an
> XML application archive format (XAR Gavin has
> suggested.)   The kind of thing I am suggesting
> can be found at http://www.topologi.com/public/dzip.html

FWIW. When Rick pointed me at the dzip page, the value was immediately 
obvious to me.The notion of XAR came from recognising that ZIP formats like 
this are the defacto standard for JAVA packaging, and they have lot's of 
wonderful properties:

  1) The nicely avoid all the MIME nastiness with regards packing of textual
       content.
  2) They already support the notion of package-metadata via the META-INF
       directory.
  3) They can be compressed.
  4) They can be made secure, by, for example, encrypting all the ZIP content
       and then providing the public key in the META-INF folder.
  
etc. etc. etc.

I think this is something we (as a community) should heartily embrace.