- From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <frystyk@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 12:34:14 -0500
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>, Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
At 15:52 11/14/97 -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote: >The spec does make it explicit, at least to the extent that general >discussion of encodings can be explicit. On-the-fly compression is >a transfer-coding. Source-based compression is a content-coding. There are two reasons why you can't substitute one for the other: 1) They don't have the same scope - one is end-to-end and the other is hop-by-hop. As the message length changes, it can only be used through proxies that know about that particular encoding. In other words: the stupidest link in the chain decides the encoding. 2) A client can't say that it "accepts" transfer codings, so there is no way to introduce the funkyflate compression. Currently, the only way is to use Accept-Encoding. I would actually vote for having a Accept-Transfer header field - this would also make the handling of trailers much easier. >The problem is that people keep trying to wedge both into content-coding >instead of just defining on-the-fly compression with Transfer-Encoding. I think you need both - the real problem is the separation of content encoding and content type. Henrik -- Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk
Received on Monday, 17 November 1997 09:38:44 UTC