On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Zvi Har'El wrote:
> 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).
In my mod_deflate module (for Apache 1.3.x) I'd enabled by default
"text/html" only. You can add or remove another type with DeflateTypes
directive. Here are some recomendations:
application/x-javascript NN4 does not understand it compressed.
text/css the same.
text/plain Macromedia FlashPlayer 4.x-5.x does not understand it
compressed when get it with loadVariables() function via browser.
text/xml Macromedia FlashPlayer 5.x does not understand it
compressed when get it with XML.load() function via browser.
application/x-shockwave-flash FlashPlayer plugin for NN4 for Windows
does not understand it compressed. Although plugin for Linux
NN4 work correctly.
text/rtf MSIE 4.x-6.x understand correctly them
application/msword when compressed. NN and Opera does not.
application/vnd.ms-excel
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
Igor Sysoev
