Kris Zyp wrote:
I suspect compression from the UA to the server will need support on
the XHR object in order to work. I don't think the right way to do
it is through setRequestHeader though, that seems like a hack at best.
I would have thought this would be negotiated by the server sending a
Accept-Encoding header to indicate what forms of encoding it could
handle for request entities. XHR requests are almost always proceeded
by a separate response from a server (the web page) that can indicate
the server's ability to decode request entities.
I think that this would go against the spirit of HTTP. The idea of
HTTP is that it is state-less, so you should not carry state from one
request to the next.
Encoding capability isn't really a state in the HTTP sense, since it is
presumably an immutable characteristic of the server, rather than a
mutable state of an application (the latter being what HTTP abhors). It
seems completely analagous to Accept-Ranges which works exactly the same
(communicates the server's ability to handle Range requests and what
range units are acceptable).
You might be right, I'd have to defer to people that know HTTP better
than me.
I'm not sure it's a capability of the server, but rather a capability of
that particular URI. For example <example.com/foo.cgi> might be
implemented using entirely different code from <example.com/bar.php>.
/ Jonas
