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Absence of Accept-Encoding #424

Closed mnot closed 4 years ago

mnot commented 11 years ago

https://svn.tools.ietf.org/svn/wg/httpbis/draft-ietf-httpbis/latest/p2-semantics.html#header.accept-encoding says:

A request without an Accept-Encoding header field implies that the user agent will accept any content-coding in response.

This statement confused a browser vendor I was talking to, because "accept" is misleading here; it implies that the client is capable of processing any encoding. It would be more accurate to say:

A request without an Accept-Encoding header field does not indicate the content-codings (if any) that the user agent finds acceptable.

or 

A request without an Accept-Encoding header field implies that the user agent will accept any content-coding in response. Note that the user agent might not be able to process an encoding sent in response to such a request.

If we intend servers to be able to infer something from that, we should say so directly.

Reported by @mnot, migrated from https://trac.ietf.org/trac/httpbis/ticket/424

mnot commented 11 years ago

@mnot changed owner from draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics@tools.ietf.org to ``

mnot commented 11 years ago

fielding@gbiv.com commented:

From 2084:

(editorial) Clarify that no Accept-Encoding means that the user agent has no prefereence, not that it must implement all possible codings; addresses #424

mnot commented 11 years ago