Microsoft released a little update for IE6 fixing GZIP decompression, quite some time ago. This is pretty cool, because our flashy Flash GUIs can now communicate with PHP on the server side like this:

Request

POST /xmlrpc ..  HTTP/1.1

x-flash-version: 7,0,19,0

Content-Type: text/xml

Authorization: Basic dW5kZWZpb.... 

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

<methodCall>... 




Response

Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 12:29:13 GMT

Content-Encoding: gzip

Content-Type: application/xml+rpc

99a ...

This is pretty cool (and has worked with Mozilla for ages), because this makes the Flash↔XMLRPC↔PHP approach more feasible at last. The inefficiency of sending "large" XML documents hasn't been a showstopper (obviously, we did it anyway), but now it makes even more sense than before: open standards, high debugability, and acceptable speed due to the compression turned on when the system goes productive. and, of course, we don't have to reload the entire page on every interaction as do classic html-based applications.