Re: CUAP 3.1

"Alex Rousskov" <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Jim Ley wrote:
> > A user is likely to be confused if they open a URI (say
> > http://www.example.org/stuff.html ) with content-type: text/html and
> > content-encoding: gzip, in their HTML UA, they then save it locally and
they
> > can no-longer use their HTML UA to open it.
>
> Two counter-arguments: First, a decent UA should be able to "open" a
> compressed document, especially if it saved the document as such.

I don't agree with this, how is it supposed to know it's compressed?  Whilst
what you say is undoubtedly true for HTTP, it's a completely useless, and
suggests that content-encoding has basically no use on the web today, and
transfer-encoding should be used, if this is so the document very much needs
to be saying this, as content-encoding is the one that is used.

> Second, and perhaps more important, an average user should not know
> that the resource is "HTML". The resource should be named
> http://www.example.org/stuff to avoid confusion.


They still know it's a document they viewed in their web browser, then saved
it, and now can no-longer open it, hiding the extension does nothing to
solve this problem, which is the key one, the average user would also not
have a gunzip available.

Jim.

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2003 17:17:37 UTC