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.

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



Bert

PS. For the anecdote: about five years ago, W3C looked into creating a
working group to define such a packaging format. Some people proposed to
use an existing format (ZIP or TAR) and just specify which file to extract
first, others proposed to define a new XML format instead (remember that
this was at the height of the XML hype), but most of all there wasn't
enough interest...

-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/ 
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos/                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France