Re: GZip Encoding

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 19:02, ian@iyates.co.uk wrote:

> One of my sites uses server-side gzip compression on pages requested by clients
> that have declared they accept gzip in their request header.
> Since the validator fails with gzip data, wouldn't it make sense not to request
> the URI with "gzip" within the "Accept-Encoding" header?

As far as I know, the Validator instance at validator.w3.org does not
announce support for gzip in its requests in any way.  (And it does not
support gzip ATM, as you noted.)  If your site sends gzipped content to
it anyway, you might want to review its code and/or configuration.

Here's a sample request from the validator captured a few seconds ago,
no Accept-* or TE headers present:

  GET / HTTP/1.1
  Connection: close
  Host: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
  User-Agent: W3C_Validator/1.305.2.137 libwww-perl/5.79

Semi-offtopic: basically, adding gzip and deflate support for the
Validator (and Link Checker) would be trivial.  If the Compress::Zlib
module is available, the underlying libwww-perl library announces
support for it and things "just work", no code changes needed at the
Validator side.

However, libwww-perl does not send the Accept-Encoding header by
default, it uses the TE header instead [1].  See
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.39

[1] Currently the libwww-perl default for that would be:
    TE: deflate,gzip;q=0.3

Received on Monday, 19 July 2004 16:30:31 UTC