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Re: Compressing HTML

From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 23:30:04 PDT
Message-Id: <34178FEC.BB038623@parc.xerox.com>
To: Andrew Daviel <advax@triumf.ca>
Cc: Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>, www-html@w3.org, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
X-Mailing-List: <http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com> archive/latest/4386
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
Received on Wednesday, 10 September 1997 23:34:50 UTC

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