I would suggest just going with the most widely used software
compression algorith, PKZIP from the IBM PC world. I don't know
PKZIP is an application program that contains several different
compression algorithms and rules for choosing among them.
gzip, mentioned here some days ago, is interoperable with PKZIP for
compression and decompression of files as are a host of other programs
on a variety of platforms. The algorithms used were released by Phil
Katz (PKWare) and others to the public.
Do note, however, that the encoding used is inherently binary, so one
would need to compress and then apply, e.g., base64 encoding. There
would be obvious large advantages in the email world to have a
compressor that produced nothing but the characters used in base64
directly, rather than going through a compress-and-encode process.
Does this mean we are converging, or just going around in circles?
-john