gzipped images in SIAP 1.0

[Norman Gray]

Rob,

On 2007 May 23 , at 02.06, Rob Seaman wrote:

> To return to something Norman Gray said:
>
>> If you wanted to distribute a gzip file -- ie, the client is  
>> neither expected nor permitted to _transparently_ unzip it -- then  
>> you'd use application/x-gzip, or whatever the appropriate MIME  
>> type for a zipped file is; but that's not what you want, I don't  
>> think
>
> In the case of SIAP (and the VO in general) what is the client  
> expected to do with such files?  Is the assumption that the value  
> of the compression is purely for transport, not for client storage  
> efficiency?  In that case might not a transfer encoding be what is  
> desired, not a content encoding?

Yes, I was indeed conflating HTTP content-encoding, HTTP transfer- 
encoding, and MIME content-transfer-encoding (hrumph!); I corrected  
myself in a subsequent message.

The reason why application/x-gzip is a poor MIME type is for exactly  
the reason you suggest: it gives a client no clues about what it's  
expected to do with the bytestream.

All the best,

Norman


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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
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