Subject: Re: Review of Content-Encoding: value token

From: Henrik Nordstrom <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:45:49 +0200

tor 2009-01-22 klockan 22:40 -0800 skrev David Morris:
> Exact reconstruction is always safest. But it seems to me that a new 
> encoding for an html (or xml) document which stripped trailing blanks and 
> tabs might satisfy the above constraints. Since ETag creation is the 
> responsiblity of the origin server, I don't think the transformation I
> describe would matter. The ETag would need to change if the pre-encoding 
> content changed.

Note: Content-Encoding changes REQUIRES ETag to change as well, even for
weak etags. Two repesentations of the same URI with different
Content-Encoding MUST NOT share the same ETag. ETag selection is AFTER
content-encoding, not before.

HTTP as such does not really care what kinds of transforms
Content-Encoding applies. The genereal expectation is that it's a
lossless transform, but this is not a requirement and do not need to be
a requirement.

Regards
Henrik