File Archiving

Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of an npm package? At its heart, it’s nothing more than a gzipped tarball. Working in software development, source code and binary artifacts are nearly always shipped as .tar.gz or .tgz files. And gzip compression is supported by every HTTP server and web browser out there. caniuse.com doesn’t even give statistics for support, it just says “supported in effectively all browsers”. But here’s the kicker: gzip is starting to show its age, making way for newer, more modern compression algorithms like Brotli and ZStandard.