Re: Data compression APIs?

On 01/26/2012 02:11 AM, Mitch Zollinger wrote:
> In designing the technology that satisfies the use case doc posted 
> previously (http://www.w3.org/wiki/NetflixWebCryptoUseCase) it would 
> appear that we need to support compression / decompression APIs.
>
> The reason is that for our "MsgSec" protocol, we encrypt every message 
> going over the wire and since encrypted data cannot be compressed, the 
> compression has to happen before encryption. Therefore standard things 
> like HTTP gzip compression will not work.
>
> What we're looking for is something along the lines of:
>
>   function compress(data, algorithm)
>   function uncompress(data, algorithm)
>
> where algorithm is one of the standard ones (gzip, bzip2, etc.)
>

So, I think while I could see this being outside the scope of the WG, I 
would be OK with it being part of the scope of the WG if we don't get 
feature-bloat.

So, is there anything *beyond* a simple compress/uncompress that is needed?

Note that there is some experience (albeit in a separate field, W3C 
Widgets/Google Gadgets/etc. of even simple gzip being surprisingly 
difficult to standardize. However, since there are crypto ramifications 
to compression, I'm game for it being in scope. How many people *want* 
this? Any objections?



> Is this the right forum for looking at this type of functionality?
>
> Mitch
>
>

Received on Monday, 30 January 2012 10:51:48 UTC