Re: HTTP/1.1 draft 12 aug 1996 and content encodings

Nicolai Langfeldt:
>
[...]
>* Firstly, the Accept-Encoding header.  It is used for content
>negociation.  It's absense implies that any Content-Encoding is
>acceptable to the client.  There seems to be no way to specify that
>the client wishes only unencoded documents returned.

There is a way: see the last line of the Accept-Encoding section:

    An empty Accept-Encoding value indicates none are acceptable.

This means that you can send just

  Accept-Encoding:

to get only unencoded documents.

[...]
>* Secondly about the usage of the Content-Encoding header.  I have
>seen, in various places, that the correct Content-Encoding for a file
                                   ^^^^^^^
>named, index.html.gz should be 'gzip'.

HTTP/1.1 does not specify any rules for `correctly' translating file
extensions into Content-Type and Content-Encoding headers; HTTP
servers are free to choose their own rules, and no consistency across
applications is required.

Of course, this makes automatically choosing a filename to save a page
to an art, not a science.  I'd go with Larry's suggestion to use the
local conventions for file extensions.

>Regards,
>  Nicolai Langfeldt

Koen.