RE: Compressing HTML

On Tue, 9 Sep 1997, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

> "Compress" is not a standard, and uses the patented LZW algorithm.
> GZIP is the only compressed encoding both patent-free and specified
> in an RFC (an informational RFC rather than an official standard, but
> better than nothing).  The GZIP program suffers from the GPL, but the
> GZIP encoding standard does not--the format is public domain.

I guess I should have looked in the RFCs. RFC 1945 gives 
compress, gzip as aliases for x-compress, x-gzip while RFC 2068 gives
x-compress, x-gzip as aliases for compress, gzip.
My Linux Netscape 3.01 only sends Accept, Accept-Language not
Accept-Encoding, though it does in fact  accept both encodings and the
Accept-Encoding header was defined in the HTTP/1.0 spec. 

Pity; one might have been able to negotiate on large documents
(in my case a difference between 128kb and 4kb - surely significant on
non-compressing network links).

(Cc:'s - I was wondering why compression was not supported in
Netscape (& MSIE) for Windows)

Andrew Daviel
TRIUMF & Vancouver Webpages