Manifest vs Properties file format

Question

After some searching on Google and here, I still haven't found any answer to the following:

Is there a reason that JAR manifests don't just use the properties format?

I am guessing this is historical but it would be nice to know how exactly this came to be – was the decision not to use properties format explicitly made or was the properties format developed after the manifest format?

As far as I can see there would be no technical reason, though manifest format seems a bit more readable.

Answer 1

Good question. I can only speculate.

But one important detail about the Properties implementation (although not necessarily the specification of the file format) is that it doesn't support multiple values with the same key (which you need for per-entry values in the manifest) and for keeping and representing the order of its entries.