On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 06:05:45 -0700 Gordan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Are there any objections to the above spec, other than objections
>to using any non-manual compression?

I've been following this thread with increasing disgust so that the time
has come to express my thoughts on this issue. ;)

I think there are to many forward, backward and inter-node compatibility
issues with general single file compression. And I doubt it will be generally
useful.

So, compression would be beneficial in only two cases:
 A) compress compressible data, mostly text/plain and text/html
 B) compress compressed data slightly to fit in a smaller log2size key

I only now of three applications, which would benefit from case A:
 1. Frost uses plain text messages and control-messages. So Frost should
improve its protocol and compress the messages on its own! Because of
the restricted domain the compression algorithm could be highly optimized.
 2. Freenet Message Board (FMB) uses plain text messages and control-
messages. So FMB should improve its protocol and ... see point 1.
 3. Freesites use plain text html files. I'm not much into this but in
the good ol' web my browser sends an "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate"
to the server and I know of at least one server sending me gzipped HTMLs.
Can this be extended to Freenet? E.g. by including in the content's metadata
a "Info.Encoding=gzip" line?

Case B (compress compressed data slightly) should happen very rarely.
It could be that an uncompressed 520KiB PDF occupying an 1 MiB key could
fit --when compressed-- into a 512 KiB key. But I think it's up to the
kindness of the content provider to compress the data where it's gonna
be useful.

To summarize:
 - I see no need for an automatic compression done by Fproxy. And neither
by the node! ... good grief!
 - Frost and FMB should compress their messages
 - Freesites could be gzipped, if this is a web standard and if it can
be done without reinventing the wheel.

jnk



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