[rescue] sufreeware .gz

[Kevin Loch]

It looks like this is what's happening.  Even though there is nothing
in the application list for .gz, or anything that uses gzip/zcat etc,
it looks like netscape is automagically uncompressing it anyway.
I don't see any obvious place to turn that off either.  I also
tried to manually ftp the uncompressed version and it diddn't work,
so it looks like I am misconfigured, not sunfreeware :)

KL

Nathaniel Grady wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 12:25:29 -0500, Kevin Loch <kloch at gurunet.net> said:
> Does anyone know why sunfreeware has ftp gzip enabled?  From the
> website,
> netscape requests the uncompressed version of files, greatly increasing
> consumed bandwidth and download time.  Why don't they just serve
> the files via http for http clients?
> ---------------
> I believe Netscape is actually un-gzipping them for you. I believe
> according to the HTTP or HTML spec you're supposed to be able to serve
> webpages gzip'd... Netscape often automagically un-gz's things for you
> when you download them - try using wget  on the url you're downloadnig
> and you'll get the gz. If i remember correctly (don't have a windows box
> to test this on) the reason .html.gz isn't more popular is that IE did't
> support it and windows people don't know what a .gz is. It follows from
> the unix "tradition" of compressing big documents - postscript very
> frequently comes as .ps.gz and ghostscript automagically decompresses
> them on the fly.
> 
> Moral of the story: don't trust webbrowsers to be able to download
> anything but webpages and pictures.
> 
> 'course i could be completely wrong :)
> --
> 
> --Nathaniel Grady
> 
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