2008.02.07 17:23 "Re: [Tiff] Tiff Digest, Vol 45, Issue 3", by Gerben Vos

One issue which concerns me, specifically with regard to long-term preservation, is that there is no vendor-independent specification for ZIP. This doesn't matter for most users, since the format is well-documented, but it has "reserved" fields, which raise questions for the reconstruction of ZIP archives decades later. I discussed that issue a little here: http://fileformats.blogspot.com/2007/08/should-there-be-iso-zip-standard.html

Neither TIFF nor ZLIB uses the ZIP file structure (which indeed hasn't been independently specified). They only use the Deflate compression method from ZIP, which has been specified as RFC1951. Not as good as ISO standardization, but not as bad as you seem to indicate. It also has much less "reserved" fields.

Gerben Vos.