Re: new editorial issue RANGE_WITH_CONTENTCODING
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen (frystyk@w3.org)
Mon, 17 Nov 1997 12:34:14 -0500
At 15:52 11/14/97 -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>The spec does make it explicit, at least to the extent that general
>discussion of encodings can be explicit. On-the-fly compression is
>a transfer-coding. Source-based compression is a content-coding.
There are two reasons why you can't substitute one for the other:
1) They don't have the same scope - one is end-to-end and the other is
hop-by-hop. As the message length changes, it can only be used through
proxies that know about that particular encoding. In other words: the
stupidest link in the chain decides the encoding.
2) A client can't say that it "accepts" transfer codings, so there is no
way to introduce the funkyflate compression. Currently, the only way is to
use Accept-Encoding. I would actually vote for having a Accept-Transfer
header field - this would also make the handling of trailers much easier.
>The problem is that people keep trying to wedge both into content-coding
>instead of just defining on-the-fly compression with Transfer-Encoding.
I think you need both - the real problem is the separation of content
encoding and content type.
Henrik
--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk