In computing, Deflate is a lossless data compression file format that uses a combination of LZSS and Huffman coding. It was designed by Phil Katz, for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool. Deflate was later specified in RFC 1951 (1996).Katz also designed the original algorithm used to construct Deflate streams. This algorithm was patented as U.S. Patent 5,051,745, and assigned to PKWARE, Inc. As stated in the RFC document, an algorithm producing Deflate files was widely thought to be implementable in a manner not covered by patents. This led to its widespread use – for example, in gzip compressed...