Re: new editorial issue RANGE_WITH_CONTENTCODING

The fact that compression is a good thing is not an issue -- all of
the studies I've seen have been just as valid for pre-compressed data
as for on-the-fly compression (in fact, most of the timing comparisons
were done only with pre-compressed data).

>Having said that: I realize that there may be a conflict between the
>right thing to do for Ranges with on-the-fly compression, and for
>Ranges with .gzip files.  And maybe the spec needs to be able to make
>the distinction explicit, rather than us arguing about which single
>mode should be supported?

The spec does make it explicit, at least to the extent that general
discussion of encodings can be explicit.  On-the-fly compression is
a transfer-coding.  Source-based compression is a content-coding.

The problem is that people keep trying to wedge both into content-coding
instead of just defining on-the-fly compression with Transfer-Encoding.

Whether or not Range applies to content-coded entities is not an issue.
The implementations demonstrate that it does.

....Roy

Received on Friday, 14 November 1997 16:10:00 UTC