Re: Javascript/CSS on the fly

[McDarren]

This is not directly related to your question, but it may help nevertheless.

If you're serving a lot of dynamic content from an Apache server, then you might want to check out the mod_deflate module. I only became aware of this module the other day (it was suggested by a cow-worker).

This is what happened after I implemented it on one of our servers - which serves almost exclusively dynamic content (look at the big drop in outgoing bandwidth at midnight on Friday night).

Cheers,
Darren :)

[cees]

Unfortunately, it is generally recommended that you do not compress js or css files, since there are browsers out there that do not support it properly (1). They support compressed text/html content, but sometimes mess up with any other text based content that is compressed.

But using mod_deflate (or mod_gzip for Apache 1.3) is definately something that most admins should be looking at.

(1) http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B327286

[belg4mit]

That's only an issue if it isn't inlined. And if it isn't inlined you can allow for caching better by providing some parameter in the URI to tie it to the page or set of pages it was generated for /applies to.

[mickeyc]

I recently wrote a mod_perl output filter which sits inside Apache. It intercepts requests for .css files and then "compresses" them on the fly before sending. It's not gzip compression, what it does is strip whitespace, comments, newlines etc. Check it out here: Compressing CSS on the fly