On Friday 21 June 2002 23.17, Slava Bizyayev wrote:
> Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Content compression has not
> been introduced at all in HTTP/1.0, and Content-Encoding was used
> by Netscape mainly for their early experiments with content
> compression. Some of that old browsers are still in use, but they
> are buggy usually.
Does not change my point a bit, and is in fact false. Content-Encoding
is well defined in HTTP/1.0. It is Transfer-Encoding that is new in
HTTP/1.1 and also the directory of standard encoding names is cleaner
in HTTP/1.1 than in the HTTP/1.0 specification but fully compatible
provided the browser is at least HTTP/1.0 compliant...
Content-Encoding is a End-To-End property. If the server identifies
the receiving end as capable of receiving the reply encoded in
certain manner then it is fully safe to do so over HTTP/1.0 provided
the reply is correcly protected from any HTTP/1.0 caches that may not
know about Vary.
You cannot safely respond with a specific Content-Encoding other than
identity unless you have positively identified the receiver as
capable of receiving the selected encoding. This is true independent
of the signalled HTTP version.
Regards
Henrik
Received on Fri Jun 21 2002 - 16:27:09 MDT
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