http/1.0 and deflate/gzip

Question

Is http/1.0 able to handle deflated and gzip content? I've finished to implement deflate and gzip in my minimalist web server and I don't really know if browsers with http/1.0 are capable to handle deflate and gzip compressed content.

Answer 1

Check out this rather extensive list. (short answer appears to be : Yes they do).

Answer 2

Well really it's down to the browser; not the protocol (HTTP 1.0 does allow for compression quite happily)

You should be examining the Accept-Encoding header, which will either be gzip, deflate. If the header isn't there then don't compress.

Answer 3

There appear to be different interpretations of what deflate means. HTTP 1.1 specifies RFC 1950 (zlib) format but IIS produces a raw Deflate stream instead. Internet Explorer cannot handle an RFC 1950 stream - it interprets the deflate Content-Encoding as RFC 1951 - so you may want to avoid that format entirely.

The .NET DeflateStream only implements the Deflate compression algorithm, it does not create the Zlib format.