Re: [squid-users] Compressing HTML pages before sending to client

From: Henrik Nordstrom <hno@dont-contact.us>
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:23:26 +0200

On Monday 21 July 2003 05.41, mwestern@sola.com.au wrote:
> there's only one problemm with that idea (which i might add is a
> good one). the browser has no idea about any compression of any
> kind (as far as i know). you'd need an appl on your browsing
> machine to undo the compression and feed it to the browser.

There is varying degrees of support for compression in most browsers
today.

The official way to do this in proxies is to use what is called
"Transfer Encoding" in HTTP/1.1.

The official way to do this in web servers is to use "Content
Encoding", but a web server may also use "Transfer Encoding".

A transforming proxy may apply new content encodings to replies, but
is not recommended unless one has a clear understanding of HTTP/1.1
ETag interactions when modifying content entities.

The main difference between "Transfer Encoding" and "Content Encoding"
is where the coding of the entity is applied. "Transfer Encoding"
recodes the data transfer on a hop-by-hop basis, leaving the data and
semantics fully intact. "Content Encoding" applies a transofrmation
to the object as such, actually resulting in a different object, and
operates end-to-end.

Both require HTTP/1.1 to operate correctly. Support for
transfer-encoding is the major obstacle for Squid to become HTTP/1.1.

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Received on Mon Jul 21 2003 - 04:24:31 MDT

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