Re:ZIP and RAR support now available in the Google Docs Viewer
by FaceKicker on Thursday July 14, 2011 @07:13PM
(#2765586)
> The article doesn't really describe how they came to choose those two formats.
I'd guess it's because they're the most common file compression formats? The formats you mentioned are pretty obscure to most mainstream users.
Re:ZIP and RAR support now available in the Google Docs Viewer
by aristidb on Thursday July 14, 2011 @08:57PM
(#2765870)
.tar.gz is not that uncommon, I would say. And once you have .tar.gz, support for .tar.bz2 is trivial to add.
Re:ZIP and RAR support now available in the Google Docs Viewer
by cdcarter on Friday July 15, 2011 @02:20AM
(#2766479)
And I would say that if you are attempting to open an archive on Google Docs Viewer, it's probably an archive of documents, and I would say that almost all archives of documents are in .zip or .rar.
Re:ZIP and RAR support now available in the Google Docs Viewer
by yuhong on Thursday July 14, 2011 @09:40PM
(#2765957)
>.tar.gz is not that uncommon, I would say.
On Unix, as tar has been built-in to Unix for decades.
(I tried uploading a tgz file and it doesn't appear to work).
The comment at the end ("We're always adding more file types to the Google Docs Viewer") suggests that these types may be considered at some point, but seems like once the infrastructure is there you get most other compression formats for free (assuming they're calling a server-side process to do the extraction rather than either reading the header themselves in javascript or rolling their own uncompression in their backend language without calling out).