Re: What is Content-Length?

Jeffrey Mogul:
>
>    > 	If a message is sent on a persistent connection using
>    > 	a transfer-coding that does not exactly preserve the
>    > 	length of the data being encoding, then the "chunked"
>    > 	transfer-coding MUST be used, and MUST be the last
>    > 	transfer-coding applied.
>    > 
>    
>    Is there a reason to require that chunked be applied after a
>    self-delimiting transfer encoding?  There would be a (probably
>    slight)  performance penality for doing it and I don't see the
>    purpose.
>
>It seems like a mistake to get into the business of specifying
>self-delimiting transfer codings (aside from chunked, which is
>a generic way to do that).

I agree, but requiring chunked on top will get us in the much nastier
business of forbidding self-delimiting transfer codings specified by
others.

It should be legal to use something like gzip as the top transfer
encoding.  If a server has to put chunking on top of a gzipped stream
without knowing the size of the zipped data beforehand, this could be
quite expensive in terms of either memory copy operations or software
complexity.  The same is true for decoding such a thing.

>-Jeff

Koen.

Received on Tuesday, 16 December 1997 04:30:38 UTC