Government Web Standards
Comments: Recommendation 4.1.3 Compression of large files or collections of small files
Discussion for this topic
See also talk pages on this topic.
This from Andrew Martin at the MoE ...
Question 1: Zip 2.3 does not appear to be a format but rather a version number for an application?/free source code.
It also appears 2.3 is not available anymore, they are now up to v2.32, see text copied from info-zip.org homepage below:
"LATEST RELEASES: Zip 2.32 was released on 20 June 2006. WiZ 5.03 was released on 11 March 2005. UnZip 5.52 was released on 27 February 2005. MacZip 1.06 was released on 22 February 2001. See the Zip, UnZip and WiZ pages for current status and download locations."
If you are going to specify a compression format, "deflate" could be specified. Also stating that no encryption should be applied to files could be useful (but pretty obvious).
Question 2: The info-zip.org website is very difficult to navigate and the ftp servers for the windows xp binary "WiZ" are all down. Not the sort of website I would recomend we send people to - It seems more like the sort of website you would send an application developer to. Did the State Services Commission produce "web-standards-v1.0.zip" located at http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/web-guidelines/web-standards-v1.0/ using "WiZ" or one of the other apps on this page? If so could you please forward me the .exe and advise how you used the ftp sites? If not can you please advise what application you used to produce "web-standards-v1.0.zip". (unsigned contribution from User:Rowan Smith)
I think the rationale for pointing to info-zip.org in the original Guidelines was that the software was a) free and b) supported across a wide range of platforms. These days Mac OS X and Linux have de/compression utilities bundled with the OS. I'm not sure about Windows.
The other point worth mentioning is that webservers should really be set to serve compressed content anyway, so the benefits are really bundling together of lots of small files. This is probably an edge case relevant to a specialised audience, eg downloading a bunch of geo files. --09:56, 23 May 2008 (NZST)
These comments don't cover PNG images. PNG images can be compressed substantially via Infranview, as it has a PNG compression subsystem. If this PNG compression subsystem can be automated into a script for real time image creation and compression -- it should be. Zip files are good for compressing stuff, but not always good for PNG images.
NZ Government Home page web performance audit
Anthony Hawkins 08:23, 21 July 2008 (NZST)
