Indeed. The claim "Deflate sucks compared to Gzip" jumped out at me. A more thorough discussion here would be helpful, something along the lines of "While deflate would be the superior choice (though narrowly), it has historically been poorly implemented in servers and user-agents and should therefore be avoided for compatibility".
It jumped out at me as well... because I'm under the impression that there are little differences between the two and they both use the same compression algorithm.
Gzip format uses the deflate algorithm and adds header and footer. Only advantage is over raw deflate is that it includes CRC, uncompressed size, and optionally original file name. None of which are necessary for HTTP. I guess there is an advantage that already gzipped files can be served for Accept-Encoding.
The difference between the two is that Gzip uses CRC32 while Deflate uses Adler32, which is slightly more performant. The problem, though, is that many browsers and servers (incorrectly) send or expect deflate without the headers, so "deflate" interoperability is a trainwreck.
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Indeed. The claim "Deflate sucks compared to Gzip" jumped out at me. A more thorough discussion here would be helpful, something along the lines of "While deflate would be the superior choice (though narrowly), it has historically been poorly implemented in servers and user-agents and should therefore be avoided for compatibility".
It jumped out at me as well... because I'm under the impression that there are little differences between the two and they both use the same compression algorithm.
Gzip format uses the deflate algorithm and adds header and footer. Only advantage is over raw deflate is that it includes CRC, uncompressed size, and optionally original file name. None of which are necessary for HTTP. I guess there is an advantage that already gzipped files can be served for Accept-Encoding.
The difference between the two is that Gzip uses CRC32 while Deflate uses Adler32, which is slightly more performant. The problem, though, is that many browsers and servers (incorrectly) send or expect deflate without the headers, so "deflate" interoperability is a trainwreck.