Re: http compression

On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Hyoung-Kee Choi <hkchoi@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> I am wondering if in HTTP, there are some scheme that compresse the data 
> in HTTP level. I have some statistic of request data size of HTTP is 300byte.
> I think this data may by compressed so that saves BW.

The current HTTP standard does not support any compression of HTTP
itself.  HTTP/1.x is a text-based protocol without any compression.
This might change with HTTP-NG...

However, there are several products that are using a compressed
version of HTTP between a pair of proxies (so that the proprietary
protocols are used only between the proxies, and not visible to other
hosts).  As far as I know, these solutions have not been submitted to
the IETF or W3C.

I am working on such a solution, with two proxies talking to each
other over a slow link (cellular phones).  The proxies are compressing
redundant fields in successive HTTP requests and responses in order to
minimize the amount of data that is transmitted over the slow link.
Of course, the data is also compressed, but this is a separate issue.
I am wondering if anybody else on this working group is dealing with
similar things and if it would be interesting to discuss HTTP
compression and maybe submit a draft about this...

If there were some guidelines about how HTTP compression should be
done, different proxies could interoperate and some clients or servers
could also support this modified protocol.  Note: compressing HTTP
headers is mostly useful for very slow links and applications
transfering small amounts of data (for the usual WWW applications, the
average size of the data transmitted with HTTP is more than ten times
larger than the HTTP headers).

Regards,
-Raphael
--
| Raphael Quinet                     E-mail: Raphael.Quinet@eed.ericsson.se |
| Research Department / Mobility Applications Lab    Phone: +49 2407575-216 |
| Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland GmbH                  Fax:   +49 2407575-400 |
| Ericsson Allee, 1, D-52134 Herzogenrath, Germany          "eviv bulgroz!" |

Received on Thursday, 9 October 1997 07:45:02 UTC