Re: What is Content-Length?
John Franks (john@math.nwu.edu)
Fri, 12 Dec 1997 10:17:44 -0600 (CST)
On Fri, 12 Dec 1997, Life is hard... and then you die. wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Scott Lawrence wrote:
>
> > There are no transfer encodings in 1.1 for which the length is
> > ambiguous; we don't need to change the spec now.
>
> I'm not sure this is true. In the latest draft I discovered the
> following
> in Section 3.6:
>
> The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) acts as a registry
> for
> transfer-coding value tokens. Initially, the registry contains the
> following tokens: "chunked" (section 3.6.1), "identity" (section
> 3.6.2),
> "gzip" (section 3.5), "compress" (section 3.5), and "deflate"
> (section
> 3.5).
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1) Are gzip, compress and deflate really to be used as both transfer
> encodings and content encodings? What's the rationale behind that?
>
Yes. A proxy may wish to compress an object before transmitting it
to a client to improve bandwith utilization or perceived speed.
The proxy can add a transfer encoding, but not a content encoding.
> 2) I'm not very familiar with the details of these encodings, but I
> believe they aren't self delimiting. Is this true?
>
I am not sure. But from the recent discussion it is very clear
that it is cruicially important that all transfer encodings be
explicitly defined to be self-delimiting or non-self-delimiting.
I am not sure this is done in the IANA registry.
John Franks
john@math.nwu.edu