RE: pack200-gzip Content Coding

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> ... where it's pretty clear this is an abuse of Accept-Encoding. I'd
hazard a guess
> that it's deployed somewhat; can some of the more Java-minded people on
the
> list ask around, please?

> To me, this seems like a good argument for a slightly higher bar in this
registry...
> and I'm sorely tempted to try to remove this entry, or at least deprecate
it, if it's
> already deployed.

Of course it is deployed and being used regularly. Anybody that uses
WebStart should probably be using it, in fact. The encoding will only be
applied to content of application/java-archive. It won't be applied to other
content-types--in fact, for most content-types, it cannot be applied. So,
there is no chance for things to go wrong.

The only important requirement for a content-encoding is that there must be
some function that maps any correctly-encoded entity into an unencoded
entity. It isn't necessary to require that every content-encoding be able to
transform any entity into an encoded entity; in particular, it isn't useful
to require content-encodings to work for any/all content-types.

The binary encodings of XML are a good example. If you were to make
binary-encoded XML a content type instead of a content-encoding, then you
would need new content-types for binary-encoded Atom, binary-encoded XHTML,
binary-encoded SOAP, etc. 

Regards,
Brian

Received on Friday, 9 April 2010 14:41:03 UTC