If a .zip file contains all of the information of the original, just in less space, why does it have to be unzipped to access any of it?
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If you look at the technical side of this there is no reason. An application that is written to work with zip files can read the file structure, uncompress each file into memory to work with the data, and even stream the uncompressed file. The only technical limitation is that you can not read any data in the middle of an archived file because the compression algorithm adapts as it is compressing the file so the begining of the file will change how the end is being compressed.
However in order to handle zip files natively you need to rewrite part of your application to use the interfaces provided by the zip libraries instead of using the interfaces provided by the file system. So it adds complexity to the application. So the easiest way to get any application to read the content of your compressed files is to first uncompress them onto the disk.
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