Re: h2#404 requiring gzip and/or deflate

* Cory Benfield wrote:
>That's not entirely true. The difference between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0
>is that in HTTP/1.1 if I send `Accept-Encoding: identity', the server
>must not return me a compressed response. In HTTP/2.0, however, the
>server may always return a response compressed with gzip or deflate.
>This means all HTTP/2.0 user-agents must allow decompression of gzip
>and deflate encoded responses, because we cannot reliably inform
>upstream that we don't want them.
>
>Jesse and I want to step that back to say that servers may always
>return a response compressed with gzip only: any other compression
>must be explicitly requested. In this sitatuion, if I then send
>`Accept-Encoding: gzip' I'll only ever get gzip back, even if the
>origin of the entity body is a HTTP/1.1 host. This would allow me to
>rip my deflate/zlib code out as I can ensure that it won't be sent to
>me.

The Accept-Encoding header indicates preferences and honouring them is a
SHOULD, not a MUST. It is not unusual to ignore it, e.g. typical Apache
configurations would send .gz files with `Content-Encoding: gzip` and
would not fail content negotiation and would not decompress the file
automatically when the client is not prepared to accept `gzip`, and some
deliberate configure it this way, e.g. to conserve resources.
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Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2014 17:34:09 UTC