Re: new editorial issue RANGE_WITH_CONTENTCODING

Jeffrey Mogul wrote:
> 
> Dave Morris writes
> 
>     one of the 'justifications' for byte ranges was the ability to
>     continue retrieving a previously interrupted response. In that
>     mode, if I were the developer of the client, I would want the byte
>     range to apply to the compressed form.
> 
> If one starts with three assumptions (which might even be "facts"):
> 
>     (1) The interruption affects the tail of a retrieval.
> 
>     (2) Most HTTP retrievals are attempting to transfer the whole resource
>     value
> 
>     (3) The compression algorithms that we actually use are one-pass
>     algorithms with finite windows, and so it is possible to extract
>     a large portion of the uncompressed form from a partial copy
>     of the compressed form.
> [...]

Jeff,
I think what you're missing is that most servers store files (er,
entities?) already compressed as, for example, .gzip files.

Can anyone offer an example of a server that compresses content on the
fly and returns it in that form?

Dave Kristol