Re: Content-Coding on POST

Dave Kristol writes:

    Apropos the discussion of compressing HTML, I have the following
    question:  suppose a user agent wants to apply a Content-Coding
    to an entity it wants to POST.  How does it know what encodings
    the origin server accepts?

No obvious way today (except perhaps by a kludge involving the
"Server" header ... no, wait, forget that I said that!).

But if, hypothetically, we were to adopt the proposal in
draft-ietf-http-options-02.txt, then you could in principle:

(1) write an RFC, whose sole non-boilerplate content is this statement

	An HTTP implementation complying with this specification
	MUST accept the "kristolization" content-coding, defined
	in [appropriate reference here].

(2) wait for the RFC editor to issue you an RFC number; let's
assume this is RFC 8742.

(3) have the client send

	OPTIONS /resource.html HTTP/1.1
	Host: research.bell-labs.com
	Compliance: rfc=8742

(4) see if the server replies with

	HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1999 20:21:52 GMT
	Compliance: rfc=8742

Hypothetically, and in principle, of course :-)

-Jeff