Has there been any advancement on this particular front?
My site has only been up for a couple of weeks and I have already heard several complaints comments regarding TAR files. Usually they consist of a single sentence: "What the crap is a tar file?". I serve mostly non-technical users (obviously). When I try to explain how there are several small, free apps that can open TAR files, I am usually met with more confused questions. To work around this I have manually ZIP'ed all the folders myself and provided a link in the comments. But, as you can imagine, this us unsustainable as more and more files are added, replaced, removed, etc.
I don't want to start some flame thread, but.... Since all consumer OS's support ZIP files without the need for 3rd party software (where only *nix support TAR natively), and given some of the other inherent limitations of TAR, would not ZIP files be a better choice (or at least be able to choose a format)?
As an alternative to providing a ZIP directly from HFS, could I make to call a batch file so I can zip on demand?
Thanks. And I apologize if this has been discussed ad nauseum in another thread and I am beating a dead horse....