[Mod_gzip] "mod_gzip_send_vary=Yes" disables caching on IE? (1.3.26.1a)

[Joe Laffey]

On Fri, 6 Dec 2002 TOKILEY@aol.com wrote:
>
> When it comes to following the 'principles of least
> astonishment' upon which the authors of HTTP
> itself based their work... I would say that just
> leaving "Vary:" out of the picture altogether and
> focusing on whatever problems remain with
> ancient Non-HTTP compliant browsers still being
> unable to 'Accept-Encoding' and/or people simply
> refusing to upgrade thier ancient browsers would
> be just as simple a focus as trying to make sure
> that everything is able to play the "Vary:" game.
>
> In other words... if it's time to start fixing what is
> 'broken' out there then why not focus on the original
> issue which is that all modern browsers can/do
> send 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' and SHOULD be able
> to do just that at all times. There are no ifs/ands
> or buts in that HTTP request header. If a browser
> sends it at all then it is NOT 'mime type specific'
> and the browser SHOULD be able to 'decode'
> ANY mime type that the Server will return...
> no questions asked.
>
> If there is ANY mime type that is going to be
> 'screwed up' by the browser if it comes back with
> 'Content-Encoding: gzip' then the browser has
> no business ever sending "Accept-Encoding: gzip"
> in the first place.
>
> The authors of HTTP did not allow this to be a
> 'conditional' signal. It's ALL ( Mime types ) or NOTHING.
>

The only problem is that the latest and great IE 5.2.2 for the Mac still
does not properly handle compressed content that has been cached by squid.
I get this problem all the time locally. I have a local squid and a local
server with mod_gzip. Any hosts for which I have not told IE to go direct
(bypass squid) will get cached on the squid box. This gets cached
compressed. Then the next time I look at it in IE 5 Mac (or any IE Mac) I
get a dialog saying IE cannot hanlde this content (gzip mime type) do you
want to save it to the disk, etc. A reload fixes the problem, but this is
still a problem.

I have reported plenty of IE Mac bugs to Microsoft and they ignore me, or
reply saying that the bug is not a bug, when it clearly is...


--
Joe Laffey              |  Want to convert subnet masks between different
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