"Jonathan M Davis" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On Thursday, December 22, 2011 06:25:42 a wrote: >> Why are you ignoring the statement about 7z having the same >> accessibility >> level as rar? Rar files are not rare and users who can open rar files (on >> Windows usually with WinRAR or 7zip) can also open 7z files. > > But not without installing 3rd party software. Windows can handle zip > files out > of the box. It can't handle the others. rar would have exactly the same > problem as 7z files (though from what I've see rar files are much more > commonly > used). We _could_ use a file format other than zip, but then we'd be > requiring > that the user download a 3rd party app just to be able to open the file, > which > is _not_ the case with zip. >
Once again: 1. "If you're a programmer, or even just a power user, you have absolutely no excuse not to *already* have a 7z-capable program [EDIT: such as WinRAR, for instance] installed." 2. "What the hell programmer is limited to whatever archive support just happens to be built into Windows?" Even *in addition* to all of that, the built-in windows support for zip is *extremely* dummy^H^H^H^H^Haverage-Joe -oriented. Page after page of hand-holding "wizard" *just* to "extract here"? I can't imagine any programmer or power user even being capable of putting up with that for more than a few days before finally just grabbing WinRAR, etc. And I'm not just speculating: Honestly, I've never even known *one* programmer or power user who actually used Windows's built-in zip support.
