Compression (was Re: your mail )

>What discussions of compression has their been? Will a simple compression
>algorithm be implemented into HTTP (only as an option, so that slower
>clients can choose not to retrieve compressed data).. The data could be
>compressed already, and sent out in this form... Also an uncompressed
>version could still be stored to send to the slower clients (who couldn't
>decompress realtime).

There were two papers in SIGCOMM'97 that discussed the benefits of 
compressing HTTP data.  An internet draft to describe protocol support
for both compression and delta-encoding (a form of compression that uses
state from a previous version of a resource) is in preparation.  Jeff
Mogul, of DECWRL, is the primary "instigator" on this. 

Fred Douglis <http://www.research.att.com/~douglis/>
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