> because zip contents are compressed independently
I "discovered" this when compressing a collection of icon and wmf files in my youth (long before gif and svg were ubiquitous (in fact before svg was even invented)).
Because the files were fairly small without a lot of redundancy the resulting archive was not massively smaller than the input files. It did take a lot less space on-disk due to no longer taking at least 512 bytes (one allocation unit on a small FAT formatted partition) per file which was enough for my needs at that point but it would still be inconvenient if I wanted to transfer them over a 14k4 modem based link, but it seemed wrong so piqued my curiosity enough that I hunted out some info via Usenet and worked out what was going on. Recompressing the zip resulted in massive savings, because the headers in the files were very similar, identical in many cases, so the inner .zip acted like the .tar format in this discussion.
> so the ordering really doesn't matter
Unless you compress again, either as another compress-to-file or through compression in the transport method, in which case there might be significant extra savings to be made if things are in the optimal order.
I "discovered" this when compressing a collection of icon and wmf files in my youth (long before gif and svg were ubiquitous (in fact before svg was even invented)).
Because the files were fairly small without a lot of redundancy the resulting archive was not massively smaller than the input files. It did take a lot less space on-disk due to no longer taking at least 512 bytes (one allocation unit on a small FAT formatted partition) per file which was enough for my needs at that point but it would still be inconvenient if I wanted to transfer them over a 14k4 modem based link, but it seemed wrong so piqued my curiosity enough that I hunted out some info via Usenet and worked out what was going on. Recompressing the zip resulted in massive savings, because the headers in the files were very similar, identical in many cases, so the inner .zip acted like the .tar format in this discussion.
> so the ordering really doesn't matter
Unless you compress again, either as another compress-to-file or through compression in the transport method, in which case there might be significant extra savings to be made if things are in the optimal order.