DEFLATE
DEFLATE (RFC 1951) is a lossless compression algorithm combining LZ77 and Huffman coding; designed by Phil Katz, it is the core of gzip, zlib, and PNG.
Purpose
It provides simple, efficient general-purpose lossless compression and is the most widely deployed compression algorithm on the web and in document formats.
Mechanism
An LZ77 sliding window (32KB) produces (distance, length, literal) sequences that are coded with either static or dynamic Huffman trees. Blocks can be marked BFINAL, and decoding is unambiguous.
Use cases
- PNG image compression
- HTTP gzip transfer
- ZIP file compression