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.

but this is false, since RFC 2068 defines "deflate":

#deflate The "zlib" format defined in RFC 1950[31] in combination with
#        the "deflate" compression mechanism described in RFC 1951[29].

and hopefully HTTP/1.1 servers will support even on-the-fly compression
and HTTP/1.1 clients will use accept-encoding to allow compressed file
transfers.


Larry
-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter