Re: Support for compression in XHR?

Kris Zyp wrote:
>>>> 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).

You might be right, I'd have to defer to people that know HTTP better 
than me.

I'm not sure it's a capability of the server, but rather a capability of 
that particular URI. For example <example.com/foo.cgi> might be 
implemented using entirely different code from <example.com/bar.php>.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2008 17:42:34 UTC