> No, I'm saying that FProxy should do the right thing w/r/to a web browser.
> Other clients may or may not need to perform automatic decompression at
> layer X. How can adding a feature to FProxy break all existing clients?
You're not proposing a feature addition to FProxy, you're proposing a new
metadata field and an addition to FProxy. Here's the metadata of two
files:
ContentType=text/plain
ContentType=text/plain
ContentEncoding=gzip
Read by an old client, these look the same. The second is actually a gzip
file. Therefore old clients will be broken with respect to handling files
that contain the ContentEncoding field since they don't know what that is.
On the other hand, you could have
ContentType=text/plain
ContentType=application/x-gzip
This is backwards compatible with old clients. They simply can't tell the
difference between a zip file and a text file which was automatically
zipped on insert, which is much more reasonable than thinking that zip
files are actually text files.
> You're right. That is so much simpler and transparent than, say, adding
> a ContentEncoding field to the Info metadata.
I didn't say it was simpler, I said it was the right way, based on several
principles.
First don't break old clients when you can help it.
Second don't add things to the specifications because it's useful or
natural for one of the implementations. As far as I can tell, the
arguement for adding the metadata field is because it makes sense in
FProxy since you just pass it through to the browser and then the browser
handles content encoding. All other clients are now required to handle
content encoding.
Doing it the other way, dispensing with the notion of encoding as
separate from file types and just having some clients which automatically
turn text/HTML files into zips and automatically unzip text/HTML files
allows it to be a totally optional added feature rather than yet another
thing which a client must do in order to be a properly functioning Freenet
client.
It's important to keep the metadata specification itself simple and to
keep the number of *required* things that a Freenet client must comply to
at a minimum.
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