| A ContentEncodingHeader is used as a modifier to the "media-type". When
present, its value indicates what additional content codings have been
applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms must be
applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the
ContentTypeHeader. The ContentEncodingHeader is primarily used to allow a
body to be compressed without losing the identity of its underlying media
type.
If multiple encodings have been applied to an entity, the ContentEncodings
must be listed in the order in which they were applied. All content-coding
values are case-insensitive. Clients MAY apply content encodings to the body
in requests. A server MAY
apply content encodings to the bodies in responses. The server MUST only
use encodings listed in the Accept-Encoding header field in the request.
If the server is not capable of decoding the body, or does not recognize any
of the content-coding values, it must send a UNSUPPORTED_MEDIA_TYPE
Response, listing acceptable encodings in an AcceptEncodingHeader.
See Also: ContentDispositionHeader
See Also: ContentLengthHeader
See Also: ContentTypeHeader
See Also: ContentLanguageHeader
author:
BEA Systems, NIST
version:
1.2 |