- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:30:05 +0100
- To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- CC: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>, Carine Bournez <carine@w3.org>, ietf-http-wg@w3.org
Mark Nottingham wrote: > > Well, if we leave the text how it is, it will have that effect... > ... Clarifying: I do agree that using Content-Encoding for encodings that are lossy on the octet stream level probably is a bad idea. And yes, implementations that introduce content codings need to make sure that outgoing (Etag:) and incoming etags (conditional headers) are transformed correctly. If that's not yet clear enough in the spec, we should improve it. That being said, the current spec text about Content Codings says: "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." -- <http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-p3-payload-05.html#rfc.section.3.2> I can see that in this case (when encoding an XML document in a new binary encoding), some people will argue that indeed there is no loss of information. So, - is it allowed (do not change the spec), or - is it allowed, but considered a bad idea (add a note to the spec?), or - it it disallows (clarify the spec to speak about octet-by-octet identity). BR, Julian
Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 10:30:54 UTC