Re: Support for compression in XHR?

>>> 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.

Encoding capability isn't really a state in the HTTP sense, since it is 
presumably an immutable characteristic of the server, rather than a mutable 
state of an application (the latter being what HTTP abhors). It seems 
completely analagous to Accept-Ranges which works exactly the same 
(communicates the server's ability to handle Range requests and what range 
units are acceptable).

Kris