> Uncompressed .tar is a reasonable choice for this application

Yes, uncompressed tar (with transfer compression, which is offered in HTTP) is an option for some amount of data.

Till the point where it isn't. zip has similar benefits as tar(+transfer compression) but a later point where it fails for such a scenario.

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chungy an hour ago | parent [-]

Zip allows you to set compression algorithm on a per-file basis, including no compression.

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QuantumNomad_ 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

You can achieve the same with tar if you individually compress the files before adding them to the tar ball instead of compressing the tar ball itself.

I don’t see how that plus a small index of offsets would be notably more or less work to do from using a zip file.

	▲	chungy 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Zip has a central directory you could just query, instead of having to construct one in-memory by scanning the entire archive. That's significantly less work.