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1cee28 German Gamboa 2026-03-20 04:58:45
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# HTTP Requests
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The following are notes from MDN's articles on HTTP requests.
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### Compression
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- Important way to increase performance of a website
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- Lowers bandwidth
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- Not a concern of the web developer but rather of the browser and server.
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#### File format compression
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- loss-less compression
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- lossy compression: jpeg meme
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Some formats can be used for both types such as webp.
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Lossy compression is usually more efficient than loss-less.
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Do not double compress (mostly)!
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ex: do not compress a jpeg, its already a compressed format.
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#### End to end compression
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- compress body of message at server and do not decompress until client.
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- gzip and br
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- Browsers use proactive content negotiation, agent sends accept-encoding, server uses content-encoding.
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#### Compression dictionary transport
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modern compression standards can use dictionaries of frequently used data over just using data in the file.
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Typical for http responses.
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#### Hop by hop compression
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Similar to end to end compression.
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Difference is compression doesn't happen at resource server but rather in any of the nodes on the way to the client.
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See TE header and transfer encoding
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In practice this is a transparent thing for the server and client, its rarely used.
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Mostly used when sending responses in chunks.
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Typically happens at proxy level (cloudflare?)