On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 09:44:19 -0800, Ian Holsman wrote about "Re: [PATCH] mod_deflate": > > > I'm still not very happy about compressing EVERYTHING and excluding > certain browsers > as you would have to exclude IE & Netscape. > > so > this is a > -1 for this patch. > in order to change this checks need to be there with a directive to > ignore them (default:off) >
IMHO, deflating everything is a waste of the computer resources. HTML files really compress well. But most of the image files currently supported, e.g., PNG, GIF, JPEG are already compressed, and deflating them will really do nothing -- just spend your CPU. I think that compressing text/html for browsers who send "Accept-Encoding: gzip" is the right approach. A possible enhancement is to have a directive (DeflateAddMimeType) which will enable deflating more mime types, e.g., text/plain, but these are really rare! Another type which is worth compressing is application/postscript, since many viewers (I am not an expert which - at least those decendents of GhostScript) are capable of viewing gzipped postscript files. The problem with that is that this is not a function of the browser, which cannot handle such files, but a function of the viewer, so the required "Accept-Encoding: gzip" doesn't prove anything about the ability of the external viewer! To summerize, I suggest to deflate only types which can be handled by the browser itself, and which are not already compressed, which amounts to text/html or more generally text/* (text/css for instance). Best, Zvi. -- Dr. Zvi Har'El mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Mathematics tel:+972-54-227607 Technion - Israel Institute of Technology fax:+972-4-8324654 http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~rl/ Haifa 32000, ISRAEL "If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all." -- Thumper (1942) Saturday, 4 Adar 5762, 16 February 2002, 9:21AM
