Re: Support for compression in XHR?

Kris Zyp wrote:
>>>> Well, at least when an outgoing XmlHttpRequest goes with a body, the
>>>> spec could require that upon setting the Content-Encoding header to
>>>> "gzip" or "deflate", that the body be adequately transformed. Or is
>>>> there another e.g. to POST a gzip request with Content-Encoding?
>>>
>>> Why can it not just be added transparently by the XHR implementation?
>>
>> I doubt that it could. An UA implementation won't know which encodings 
>> the server supports.
>>
>> I suspect compression from the UA to the server will need support on 
>> the XHR object in order to work. I don't think the right way to do it 
>> is through setRequestHeader though, that seems like a hack at best.
> 
> I would have thought this would be negotiated by the server sending a 
> Accept-Encoding header to indicate what forms of encoding it could 
> handle for request entities. XHR requests are almost always proceeded by 
> a separate response from a server (the web page) that can indicate the 
> server's ability to decode request entities.

I think that this would go against the spirit of HTTP. The idea of HTTP 
is that it is state-less, so you should not carry state from one request 
to the next.

/ Jonas