On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Rich Bowen wrote: > Question 1: Does the following seem to be a reasonable explanation of > what "encoding" means?
Yes. > > Question 2: Should this go into the mod_mime docs, or is there > somewhere else where this would fit better? Yes, in mod_mime.html. > > ----------------------------------------- > > A file of a particular MIME type can additionally be encoded a > particular way to simplify transmission over the Internet. While this > usually will refer to compression, it can also refer to encryption, or > to an encoding such as UUencoding, which is designed for transmitting > a binary file in an ASCII (text) format. > > By using more than one file extension (see Section about multiple file > extensions - link here), you can indicate that a file is of a particular > <em>type</em>, and also has a particular <em>encoding</em>. > > For example, you may have a file which is a Microsoft Word document, > which is pkzipped to reduce its size. If the .doc extension is > associated with the Microsoft Word file type, and the .zip > extension is associated with the pkzip file encoding, then the file > Resume.doc.zip would be known to be a pkzipp'ed Word document. > I like the concreteness. For reference, the RFC says: The Content-Encoding entity-header field is used as a modifier to the media-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content coding has been applied to the resource, and thus what decoding mechanism must be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field. The Content-Encoding is primarily used to allow a document to be compressed without losing the identity of its underlying media type. I think this is fairly clear, and I am tempted to suggest replacing your first paragraph directly with this paragraph. Joshua. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
