Re: content-encoding and range headers

"Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@gmx.de> writes:

> I agree that it depends on the definition of the entity body, which is [1]:
> 
> 	entity-body := Content-Encoding( Content-Type( data ) )
> 
> So I think Stefan's analysis is correct...

But Accept-Encoding does not _require_ the server to use the specified
encoding, it _offers_ to accept it.  So the request:

 GET /foo HTTP/1.1
 Host: example.com
 Accept-Encoding: gzip
 Range: 10000-19999

might return two completely different parts of /foo depending on
whether or not the server chose to apply the Content-Encoding.  Since
HTTP is stateless, you can't even count on any given server making the
same choice each time.

If you believe that interpretation, then I think you must conclude
that the combination is not very useful to the client.

The server I've worked on most didn't ever use Content-Encoding, so
it ignored Accept-Encoding.

Received on Tuesday, 10 December 2002 11:28:19 UTC