> You know what's really funny? Every time this has been brought up before,
> the Apache core has always said, if you want to have gzip'ed data, then
> gzip it when you create the site. That way, your computer doesn't have to
> waste cycles while it is trying hard to serve requests. I personally
stand > by that statement. If you want to use gzip, then zip your data
before
> putting it on-line. That doesn't help generated pages, but perl can
> already do gzip, as can PHP.
A couple of points here....
- a lot of authors can't easily zip content before putting it on-line.
Most people don't update Web sites via makefiles/scripts/whatever that can
easily be extended to zip for them. A lot of people use FrontPage or the
Windows Web Publishing Wizard - good luck explaining how to run gizp.
Remember - most users of Apache are not software develoeprs.
- a LOT of third party tools make it really hard to insert gzip output
filters in the right place. Last I checked Tomcat 3.X did not support this
without hacking at their classes. Other JSP engines are even worse.
Don't even start thinking about some of the more pricey site-management
suites.
I haven't studied either of these two modules in depth, but the lack of a
simple "negotiate on gzip encoding for text/html" option has been a major
flaw in most (all?) Web servers to date. Putting one of these in the
default Apache distribution would be a wonderful thing.
- Danny
