Question
Is http/1.0 able to handle deflated and gzip content? I've finished to implement deflate and gzip in my minimalist web server and I don't really know if browsers with http/1.0 are capable to handle deflate and gzip compressed content.
Solution
Well really it's down to the browser; not the protocol (HTTP 1.0 does allow for compression quite happily)
You should be examining the Accept-Encoding header, which will either be gzip, deflate. If the header isn't there then don't compress.
OTHER TIPS
There appear to be different interpretations of what deflate
means. HTTP 1.1 specifies RFC 1950 (zlib) format but IIS produces a raw Deflate stream instead. Internet Explorer cannot handle an RFC 1950 stream - it interprets the deflate
Content-Encoding as RFC 1951 - so you may want to avoid that format entirely.
The .NET DeflateStream
only implements the Deflate compression algorithm, it does not create the Zlib format.
Check out this rather extensive list. (short answer appears to be : Yes they do).