FamilySearch/gedcomx — Issue #140: Base file format on JAR rather than MIME
Author: nealmcb
Created: 2012-02-17 20:32:37+00:00
State: open

I love how gedcomx is generally based on modern formats and api approaches. But I'm struck by the use of the ancient MIME format, which was designed to be compatible with email formats that date back many decades. I'm a fan of MIME for email, but not as a generic container.

MIME has many disadvantages. For example, it:

* doesn't present an index of the contents of the container
* doesn't allow for efficient byte-offset indexes and selective reading of the file
* expands the contents for storage rather than compressing them

The availability of tools for MIME compared to

Please move to a format that resolves these issues. The first one that comes to mind is the [JAR (file format) ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAR_file_format) used by Open Document, and also used for Android applications in the form of [APK (file format)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APK_(file_format)), and Microsoft's Office Open XML documents. It is based on the ubiquitous ZIP format, for which a huge variety of tools and APIs and workflows is available.