Re: ISSUE CONTENT-ENCODING: Proposed wording

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen:
>
[....]
>These are the suggested changes regarding the problems in content-encoding
>and accept-encoding as described in
>
>        http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Issues/#CONTENT-ENCODING
>
>1) In section 3.5 (Content Codings), add this after the item for "deflate"
>
>        identity        The default (identity) encoding; the use
>                        of no transformation whatsoever.  This
>                        content-coding is used only in the
>                        Accept-encoding header, and SHOULD NOT

Make that MUST NOT please, else conformant clients will have to have
stupid ignore-the-identity-encoding if-statements in the parser for the
content-encoding header field.

[...]
>   An empty Accept-Encoding value indicates that only the "identity"
>   content-coding is acceptable.

If I understand this right, this says that

 Accept-encoding:

is identical to

 Accept-encoding: identity

which seems a bit odd.  Why not delete the above rule completely?

Also, am I right in assuming that

 Accept-encoding: gzip

now implies that the identity coding is _not_ acceptable for the
response?  If I am not right, then the text is too ambiguous.

Overall, I think that replacing the concept of `no encoding' from the
old draft with `identity encoding' does not improve the text of the
spec.  But it does not break the spec in a semantical sense, so I
could live with these proposed changes.

>Henrik

Koen.