[rescue] sufreeware .gz

[Nathaniel Grady]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 12:25:29 -0500, Kevin Loch <kloch at gurunet.net> said:
Does anyone know why sunfreeware has ftp gzip enabled?  From the
website,
netscape requests the uncompressed version of files, greatly increasing
consumed bandwidth and download time.  Why don't they just serve
the files via http for http clients?
---------------
I believe Netscape is actually un-gzipping them for you. I believe
according to the HTTP or HTML spec you're supposed to be able to serve
webpages gzip'd... Netscape often automagically un-gz's things for you
when you download them - try using wget  on the url you're downloadnig
and you'll get the gz. If i remember correctly (don't have a windows box
to test this on) the reason .html.gz isn't more popular is that IE did't
support it and windows people don't know what a .gz is. It follows from
the unix "tradition" of compressing big documents - postscript very
frequently comes as .ps.gz and ghostscript automagically decompresses
them on the fly.

Moral of the story: don't trust webbrowsers to be able to download
anything but webpages and pictures.


'course i could be completely wrong :)
-- 

--Nathaniel Grady

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