Comment 56 for bug 15495

@Nils-Werner, This actually is a picture perfect paper cut. It's small, easy to fix, and actually is very confusing.

My opinion is this:

The technical side: These files are archives, whether or not they're compressed. I don't think that we should stop using the terminology of an Archive. To start using Compressed File, Compress..., etc would be counter-productive. While I believe that Nils-Werner's comment is way off base and quite immature, I do believe that no one wants to see Ubuntu over-simplified. The solution here is actually quite simple.

The bigger picture: The reason people use archives is for the sake of the Internet. Once upon a time archives were used to save space on floppies and zip disks, but those were far enough back that they can be put out of our minds. The current convention of an archive is that of the Internet. By that I mean that people needed a means of transferring sets of files over slow Internet. This was two problems in one: the archiving of many files (say for a Windows theme) and then sending that data compressed over a slow connection. We no longer need to compress (generally) to send a file, but we still need to archive. Seperating those two actions a bit, however, would most likely only cause more problems. I think it's obvious that the word `zip' and the word `extract' are the most commonly known ones for archiving and unarchiving (or compressing and uncompressing) files. WinZIP helped make this the case. Even now on a Windows computer zip is the most common archiving method. Now to say that this only applies in Windows is silly. When we want to compress in Linux we do what? gZIP. bZIP2. The zip convention is still around, but we don't want it to be. Archiving is the correct term, compression is just an option.

tldr;
"Archive (zip) files..."
"Add to new archive (zip)..."

Also, the Macintosh method of "disk images" is clever. When you download an archive Gnome should (optionally) automatically open that file. The idea of treating an archive as a normal folder the way one would mount an iso to loop is genius, and treating archive compression the way Windows would treat compression on an NTFS filesystem (in short: transparently) is even better. However, I believe that is certainly beyond the scope of a paper cut. I only reiterate that idea because when it was first mentioned by Martin (#16 above) it didn't seem to get much love, and it deserves it.