Re: Review of Content-Encoding: value token

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:

>
> Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> 
>> Well, if we leave the text how it is, it will have that effect...
>> ...
>
> Clarifying: I do agree that using Content-Encoding for encodings that are 
> lossy on the octet stream level probably is a bad idea.

Well, I can see this as a strong requirement for TE, but for 
Content-Encoding, it is less of a requirement, as we do not expect to be 
able to use metrics given in the HTTP message on the "decoded" entity.

> And yes, implementations that introduce content codings need to make sure 
> that outgoing (Etag:) and incoming etags (conditional headers) are 
> transformed correctly. If that's not yet clear enough in the spec, we should 
> improve it.

You mean when serving both versions from the same URI without any CL ? 
Then yes.

> That being said, the current spec text about Content Codings says:
>
> "Content coding values indicate an encoding transformation that has been or 
> can be applied to an entity. Content codings are primarily used to allow a 
> document to be compressed or otherwise usefully transformed without losing 
> the identity of its underlying media type and without loss of information."

"information" being fuzzy enough to allow content-coding to be lossless at 
the byte-level.

--

-- 
Baroula que barouleras, au tiéu toujou t'entourneras.

         ~~Yves