> Overall, I think it appeals to the "unix philosophy" - composing two independent tools (tar and gzip) instead of having one integrated solution. The unix phi

> Overall, I think it appeals to the "unix philosophy" - composing two independent tools (tar and gzip) instead of having one integrated solution. The unix philosophy in this case breaks down when you need to access individual files. One possible "unixy" solution would be .gz.tar as opposed to .tar.gz, but it is not universally supported as .tar.gz is.