Offtopic Bikeshedding: deflate compression

[Simon Lyall]

This bugs me when I see the sample code for Compression here 
http://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/FAQ/Compression

The bit that bugs me is that "deflate" compression doesn't work with IE 
since Microsoft implimented it differently from everybody else.

This doesn't actually affect 99.99% of http queries since they are really 
using gzip but if you happen to send a deflate compressed page to IE ( 
versions 6,7,8 or 9) that is generated by a Unix box then you will get an 
error (something like "connot connect to remote site") on IE.

This edge case sometimes affects me (not with varnish but with my current 
web cache) and I suspect others will get bitten sometimes so I was 
wondering if we could remove deflate from the example code so that people 
won't also be caught.

Scarily enough this is very lightly documented on the Internet but here 
are a some links:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/883841/why-do-real-world-servers-prefer-gzip-over-deflate-encoding
http://www.vervestudios.co/projects/compression-tests/results
http://www.subbu.org/blog/2008/03/ie7-deflate-or-not

-- 
Simon Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.