Re: CUAP 3.1

"Alex Rousskov" <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Jim Ley wrote:
>
> > "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?
>
> Same way it will know that it is "HTML".

That's fine, however remember the point was to respect operating system
conventions when saving the filename, my operating system has no way of
indicating the content-encoding of a file, it can only store mime-type. So
for my operating system the advice is useless, and IMO wrong, doing more to
confuse users than otherwise.

Given my system the only way a UA could deal with it is by sniffing the
stream itself to see if it was gzipped, this is the behaviour we get with
SVGZ, and I don't think it's a good one.

>The point is that if UA saved a document as
> compressed (without user intervention other than supplying file
> "name"), then the same UA ought to be able to open it as compressed.

Exactly, so if it can't, it should not save it as such, so the advice is
misleading, it needs to be clarified to include that statement.

> If there is no way for UA to
> guess that the file contains compressed content (i.e., guess
> content-encoding), then there is probably no way for UA to guess that
> the file contains HTML either (i.e., guess content type)!

but some o/s store content-type based on the part after the last . , which
only allows one piece of metadata, the .gz in the example, so then the
HTMLness would be lost, if however it was saved uncompressed there wouldn't
be a problem.  I took the suggestion to be that it was wrong to uncompress
the content when saving, rather than simply the filename part.

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2003 05:50:07 UTC