(keitai-l) Re: Useful inventions...for conserved news?

From: Mika Tuupola <tuupola_at_appelsiini.net>
Date: 05/18/01
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.05.10105181041090.20717-100000@aurinko.taivas.com>
On Fri, 18 May 2001, Henry Minsky wrote:

> One thing I have wondered about is compression of text for iMode.
> At a max of 9600 baud, you would think you could get some significant
> gains by compressing text on the fly between server and keitai. Maybe

	In the conventional web this is allready widely supported
	(by the browsers) but mostly unknown (by the developers)
	feature. Most browsers releases since 1999 are capable of
	receiving compressed content. "Most" meaning all HTTP 1.1
	compliant browsers.

	See: 14.3 Accept-Encoding in,
	http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.txt

	When requesting for the page the client sends an
	Accept-Encoding: <accepted encoding methods> header.

	If the client accepts gzip encoding the server first checks
	if it allready has the corresponding page compressed on
	it harddrive and sends it. 

	If not the server compresses the page on the fly and sends
	that.

	When the client receives the page it automatically
	gunzips the page before rendering it. All this is transparent 
	to the end user (except that the pages usually load faster).

	If the page was requested by non HTTP 1.1 compliant
	browser the page is simply sent back uncompressed.

	The speed gain is huge over slower networks. Even though
	one might think othwerwise it actually reduces the stress
	on the serverside too. Since the time used to serve the page 
	to the client is reduced (even the time spent sending
	the page and the time spent compressing the page combined) 
	the httpd process is released earlier and is able to start
	to process the next request, thus reducing the overall server
	load.

	All of this was standardized before WAP came out. Still they
	had to reinvent the wheel and "compress" the data using WBXML
	(or whatever it was called).	 

-- 
Mika Tuupola                      http://www.appelsiini.net/~tuupola/


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Received on Fri May 18 11:50:34 2001