Re: new editorial issue RANGE_WITH_CONTENTCODING
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu)
Fri, 14 Nov 1997 15:52:54 -0800
The fact that compression is a good thing is not an issue -- all of
the studies I've seen have been just as valid for pre-compressed data
as for on-the-fly compression (in fact, most of the timing comparisons
were done only with pre-compressed data).
>Having said that: I realize that there may be a conflict between the
>right thing to do for Ranges with on-the-fly compression, and for
>Ranges with .gzip files. And maybe the spec needs to be able to make
>the distinction explicit, rather than us arguing about which single
>mode should be supported?
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.
The problem is that people keep trying to wedge both into content-coding
instead of just defining on-the-fly compression with Transfer-Encoding.
Whether or not Range applies to content-coded entities is not an issue.
The implementations demonstrate that it does.
....Roy