On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Joshua Slive wrote: > 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.
I agree that it is very clear. However, I am not sure that it is saying the same thing as my first paragraph. There is certainly some overlap, but what I'm trying to convey is specific examples of the sorts of things that might be an encoding type. > > 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. I had additionally thought of saying: While this will usually refer to compression, such as gzip, it can also refer to encryption, such as pgp, or to an encoding such as ... etc. I just often get the impression from folks I talk to about this sort of stuff that they understand how the directives work, and that Apache sends a Content-encoding header, but not what encoding actually *is* and how it might be used. I like the paragraph from the RFC. Do you think that it is overkill to put *both* of these descriptions in there? -- Pilgrim, how you journey on the road you chose To find out where the winds die and where the stories go --Pilgrim (Enya - A Day Without Rain) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
