> even documents (and by extension, spreadsheets and presentations) are compressed these days (because they're... zips! It's zips all the way down)
And how do you read those archives (or, for that matter, create them) using a ZIP library that doesn't know how to deal with compressed data?
My point is simply that DEFLATE support should be considered mandatory for any ZIP implementation. Without it, most archives you encounter will be unreadable. Yes, it can still handle archives which contain only STOREd files -- but that's an edge case which most archives won't fall into.
And how do you read those archives (or, for that matter, create them) using a ZIP library that doesn't know how to deal with compressed data?
My point is simply that DEFLATE support should be considered mandatory for any ZIP implementation. Without it, most archives you encounter will be unreadable. Yes, it can still handle archives which contain only STOREd files -- but that's an edge case which most archives won't fall into.