just a throught

[Gloria Flowers]

Have you considered placing a command in gzip to add a routine that 
converts and archive to be compressed
to binary and then uses binary compression on it designed around a 32 
bit byte to maintain compatibility with
all computing systems in use based on storage media byte size as the 
method works on images.   The binary
compression used during compiling old dos programs used byte packing as 
most things use small values and
leave alot of zeros with a leading value and with a delimiter can be 
compressed to store multiple byte values
in a single byte by removing the excess zeros.    Most of the old 
compilers supported this type of compression
using one algorithm or another to pack the byte.  It would really 
suprise me if they dropped the delimiter
in the hard disk standard as it was common in dos programs and many 
would stop working if they dropped it.