AB> Just to clarify, WWWOFFLE doesn't use the Transfer-Encoding header for
AB> hop-to-hop compression, it works the way everybody else does for
AB> end-to-end compression.
Yep. Which is why you're having all the problems you're having
(e.g. treating resources with a .gz extension specially, so as not to
decompress a tar.gz that came in with Content-Encoding: gzip).
Now don't take me wrong: you've done an excellent job of implementing
instance-level compression as reliably as it can be done.
AB> There is no reason for Apache to make a change like this if there are
AB> no clients that support it.
You're unfortunately right. But instance-level compression makes the
Range header pretty much useless, which should be sufficient incentive
for user-agent authors to implement it.
At any rate, I'm still not convinced that application layer
compression is the right thing to do. My gut feeling is that it is
better to use compression at a lower layer (e.g. PPP compression or
compressed ssh links).
Juliusz
