Re: new editorial issue RANGE_WITH_CONTENTCODING
Dave Kristol (dmk@bell-labs.com)
Fri, 14 Nov 1997 17:52:45 -0500
Jeffrey Mogul wrote:
>
> Dave Morris writes
>
> one of the 'justifications' for byte ranges was the ability to
> continue retrieving a previously interrupted response. In that
> mode, if I were the developer of the client, I would want the byte
> range to apply to the compressed form.
>
> If one starts with three assumptions (which might even be "facts"):
>
> (1) The interruption affects the tail of a retrieval.
>
> (2) Most HTTP retrievals are attempting to transfer the whole resource
> value
>
> (3) The compression algorithms that we actually use are one-pass
> algorithms with finite windows, and so it is possible to extract
> a large portion of the uncompressed form from a partial copy
> of the compressed form.
> [...]
Jeff,
I think what you're missing is that most servers store files (er,
entities?) already compressed as, for example, .gzip files.
Can anyone offer an example of a server that compresses content on the
fly and returns it in that form?
Dave Kristol