Ian Clarke wrote: > Firstly, last time I checked, no web server compresses files by > default. Furthermore, your proposal is to transparently compress all > file formats, how many non-HTML file formats do web servers > transparently compress?
Both of these are compatibility limitations for browsers. The newest Apache server (2.2.x) does ship with mod_deflate now. The issue regarding non-HTML is a browser limitation - in fact many newer browsers ask to compress everything (not that, to my knowledge, any servers yet comply). In the Freenet case, however, there is no compatibility issue. >> When I have tried to insert video etc files, they have usually been >> shrunk by the node. As I said, 1% is worth it. > > If so, then let the client or inserter make that determination, it isn't > the node's place to make it for them. But why couldn't it be? I fail to see what the negative implications of this are directly - provided there isn't a significant technical detriment (excessive CPU, for example). We'd save bandwidth, and store space, and it would be completely transparent to everyone. I'll point out that a better comparison, instead of web browsers, would be modems and other low-bandwidth links - they utilized BLTZ compression (v.42bis) on the datastream to compress data and provide faster transport, completely transparent to the endpoints. Many frame-relay connections do this today. --Ken.
