Re: Review of Content-Encoding: value token

My concern is that many implementations treat content-coding like  
transfer-codings, in some ways; that is, they layer it in  
automatically (e.g., mod_gzip). The confluence of this with things  
like byteranges, etag comparison, etc. may be quite prone to bugs.

You'd also start to get into discussions like "can't JPEG just be a  
content-coding of GIF?" and so forth. The media type system isn't  
perfect by any means, but I think it's a better fit for this type of  
thing.

Cheers,



On 23/01/2009, at 5:07 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> Yes. If it doesn't preserve characters, all sorts of mess can  
>> result, e.g., with ETag comparison, range retrieval, etc.
> > ...
>
> I was looking at <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#rfc.section.3.5 
> >...:
>
> "Content coding values indicate an encoding transformation that has  
> been or can be applied to an entity. Content codings are primarily  
> used to allow a document to be compressed or otherwise usefully  
> transformed without losing the identity of its underlying media type  
> and without loss of information."
>
> ...and was asking myself: is perfect reconstruction of the original  
> payload really required? Is there something we need to fix here?
>
> BR, Julian


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Friday, 30 January 2009 07:49:31 UTC