undefined | Better HN

0 pointssupermatt4y ago0 comments

I think I simply dont understand what this is all about.

As I understood, this is about CONTENT ENCODING using brotli - i.e. the http response message body is encoded via brotli. Why would this be any different to any other encoding on its impact on proxies?

Of course, brotli compression for the TRANSPORT is another thing. I appreciate that there may be some (non-transparent) proxies, IDS, etc that may choke - but thats not what the author seems concerned with.

It sounds as if cloudflare have disabled brotli content encoding (but just for http?), and are using brotli compressed transport incompatibilities (if you consider not being able to snoop on TLS an incompatibility) as the reason for doing so. The two are completely different things, no?

0 comments

zaarn4y ago

No this is very much about brotli transport compression, the original post mentions this more than once. I am actually not aware of any single image format that has widespread brotli content compression support (which will probably not be very useful either as most image compression methods use more domain specific algorithms).

supermattOP4y ago

The original post doesnt mention it at all, it talks about files being compressed for transfer (but no specifics on the implementation).

There is no transport compression/encoding in HTTP. There is transfer-encoding (which is hop-to-hop) and content-encoding (which is e2e). Both only compress the message body.

It seems you may be confusing content-encoding (e.g. gzip - the message-body encoding) and content-type (e.g. image/jpg - the "domain specific compression" you mention).

zaarn4y ago

There is no transport compression in HTTP? Have you ever heard of Content-Encoding? You seem to be under the impression that this is somehow not a transport compression in some way (it is).

Either way, a brotli encoded HTTP body will cause several issues with proxies and middleboxes, multiple of which have been mentioned in by Cloudflare in their email response.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointssupermatt4y ago0 comments

I think I simply dont understand what this is all about.

0 comments

zaarn4y ago

supermattOP4y ago

The original post doesnt mention it at all, it talks about files being compressed for transfer (but no specifics on the implementation).

There is no transport compression/encoding in HTTP. There is transfer-encoding (which is hop-to-hop) and content-encoding (which is e2e). Both only compress the message body.

It seems you may be confusing content-encoding (e.g. gzip - the message-body encoding) and content-type (e.g. image/jpg - the "domain specific compression" you mention).

zaarn4y ago

There is no transport compression in HTTP? Have you ever heard of Content-Encoding? You seem to be under the impression that this is somehow not a transport compression in some way (it is).

Either way, a brotli encoded HTTP body will cause several issues with proxies and middleboxes, multiple of which have been mentioned in by Cloudflare in their email response.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse