Re: Clarification of the term "deflate"

On Aug 7, 2007, at 2:36 PM, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:

> On tis, 2007-08-07 at 17:10 +0100, Paul Marquess wrote:
>
>> One possibility is to remove the reference to RFC 1951 completely.
>>
>>   deflate
>>     The "zlib" format defined in RFC 1950 [31].
>
> 1950 doesn't reference 1951.
>
>> 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].
>
> RFCs define formats and protocols, not implementation. So it should
> refer to the format defined by 1951, not the mechanism used for
> producing that format.

Yes, but

<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/ange/archives/archives-96/http-wg- 
archive/1343.html>

is no help.  I had always thought deflate referred to the unwrapped
format, whereas gzip refers to the wrapped format.  The problem
is that there are advantages to storing the content in gzip format
and selectively delivering it according to which T-E's or C-E's
are listed as acceptable.

I think it is worthy of an issue number.

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2007 23:06:39 UTC