Re: Transfer time

Brian Behlendorf ([email protected])
Sat, 20 May 1995 13:26:41 -0700 (PDT)


On Sat, 20 May 1995, Nathan J. Strange wrote:
> It seems to me that everyone is going to want detailed and large
> virtual worlds.. just the kind that love to eat up bandwidth
> for vrml 1.1 how about adding a mime type for some sort of simple
> compresion. .wrc files could be this new type....

This will be in the FAQ soon.

Compression is largely orthogonal to the file type, as HTTP supports
labelling things as compressed and instructing the HTTP user agent to
decompress it before handing it off to be rendered.

Please see http://vrml.wired.com/arch/2009.html for more info. The
essence is there's no need to define a new file type or anything for
compression, just do it and make sure the server it sits on is correctly
labelling it.

> We could get a lot of
> compression just by translating all of the commands into 1 or 2 byte
> sequences, chuckin comments and whitespace and making everything binary

Gnu-zip does this quite well.

Brian

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