Gzip Encoding of Web Pages?

Both Brendan Quinn and msim were curious about the ability to send gzip-encoded Web pages. Brendan asks: "It's possible to make Apache detect the "Accept-encoding: gzip" field sent by NS 4.7+, IE 4+ and Lynx, and send a gzip-encoded page, thus saving lots of bandwidth all over the place. So why don't people do it? Here is a module written by the Mozilla guys a couple of years ago that -almost- does what I want, and I could change it pretty easily... but I thought someone else would have done it by now? eXcite do it, does anyone know of any other large-scale sites that use gzip encoding?"

"If you have LWP installed, you can check with:

GET -p '<my proxy>' -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip' -e http://www.site.com/ | less

Try that with 'www.excite.com' and you'll get binary (gzipped) data. That's what I want to do."

Comments

How about this?

[kevin42]

http://perl.apache.org/guide/modules.html#Apache_G zipChain_compress_HTM

Re:Does it work with Windows?

[Quietust]

Here's what IE5.5 gives when I go to http://127.0.0.1/:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
Host: 127.0.0.1
Connection: Keep-Alive

In comparison, Netscape 4.75:

GET / HTTP/1.0
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (Win98; U)
Host: 127.0.0.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8

The main points of interest are that IE5.5 can handle HTTP/1.1 while Netscape only requests HTTP/1.0, and that IE5.5 also claims to handle gzip AND deflate encoding, even though they're exactly the same (last time I checked, gzip used the deflate algorithm).

I also tried sending the IE5.5 HTTP request via telnet to www.excite.com; it returned plain text, whereas Netscape's HTTP request returned gzipped data.

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Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.

Re:Why do it at all?

[AT]

The page quoted in the article shows its a pretty big win for some "typical use" sites on slower modems.

Incidentally, no extra load would be neccessary on the server for static content if it was pre-compressed.