Re: Netscape 4.5 and HTTP/1.1 Accept-Encoding
David W. Morris (dwm@xpasc.com)
Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:06:25 -0800 (PST)
On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, John Franks wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Dave Kristol wrote:
>
> I think gzip and compress are different encodings. The fact that
> a program called "gzip" understands both is not relevant.
me too ...
>
> >
> > 2) My server should not send 406, since it's only a SHOULD requirement
> > anyway. Or perhaps it should send 406 only for HTTP/1.1 requests.
> >
>
> What does your server do if a client sends a request with *no*
> Accept-Encoding? I think that's what it should do in this case.
> (E.g. send it as application/octet-stream).
>
> It is quite likely that there will be clients which support some
> content encodings but not all the ones you support. I don't think you
> want your server to be in the situation where it completely refuses to
> serve a file to such clients.
Better I think is that the server maintain two versions or in this case,
uncompress on the fly ... or send a choice page that lets the user
click the link for the explicit file... my assumption being that the
request was for the resource w/o the _Z ... if the _Z is requested,
then John's approach is reasonable ... one of the things missed in
this whole mess is that the user *MAY* simply want the file delivered
unmolested and saved on the hard drive. It is quite inconvenient for
me when something is unziped or uncompressed by browsers, servers, etc.
Dave Morris