How to compress HTTP response headers?

Question

At a Velocity 2010 conference, Google said headline compression could be of great benefit :

Hölzle noted a blatant inefficiency in processing web page headers that provide information about the user's IP address, browser, and other session data. The average web page makes 44 calls to various resources, many of which include duplicate header data. Holzle said heading compression results in 88 percent better page loading for some leading sites.

How to provide compression of response headers sent by the web server? Is this possible with today's technology?

Answer 1

The presence of HTTP request headers or compressed response headers does not comply with HTTP 1.1 standards.

This expresses some analysis of how such a scheme can be performed:

1) Perhaps they mean that you can accomplish this with another custom http scheme, for example say httpc:// .

I could also say that sending requests and responses to / from the same server in batches of 5 increases the speed of work on the Internet. I call this scheme httpBrian:// .

2) If you assume that they mean only the HTTP response headers, the request headers may have a different header that indicates that you want the response to be an incompatible HTTP response. I assume this will have problems with proxies, etc.

3) If you assume that they mean only PARTIAL HTTP response headers, then the HTTP server can place non-proxy server headers that are not directly important, except for the client-client executing the request, compressed into another header. An HTTP request will include this feature. This is most likely what they are trying to accomplish.

Answer 2

Read the paragraph in more detail! Hölzle talks about web page headers , not http headers. Therefore, we are talking about something like a meta tag, etc.

Well, it seems that although I was replaced (correctly) a lot, I was the first to find the right sources . This is about the new application level protocol SPDY (SPeeDY get it?) From Google, which offers HTTP header compression.

Answer 3

If the infrastructure supports header compression through some type of user transport protocol, then it will be compressed until it is passed to an entity that does not support this function.

In the end, perhaps even our browsers would support it. Therefore, I think that they use a proactive approach, opening it on the server and seeing how far it goes.