RE: Clarification of the term "deflate"

From: Henrik Nordstrom [mailto:henrik@henriknordstrom.net]
 
> On tis, 2007-08-07 at 14:20 +0100, Paul Marquess wrote:
> 
> > 1. The definition of "deflate" needs to be rewritten to remove the
> > ambiguity.
> 
> Any suggestion?

One possibility is to remove the reference to RFC 1951 completely.

  deflate
    The "zlib" format defined in RFC 1950 [31]. 

This variant keeps both RFC 1950 & 1951 but drops the troublesome labels.

  deflate
    The compressed data format defined in RFC 1950 [31] in combination with
    the compression mechanism described in RFC 1951 [29].

> I don't see how the definition is ambiguous, apart from the poor choice
> of name (should have been zlib, not deflate).

Indeed - the choice of name is the source of the ambiguity - there are two
conflicting uses of "deflate" in the definition. If 2616 had used "zlib"
instead of "deflate" the problem wouldn't have happened. 

Paul