Dev411 Blog

Given that many, but not all, web browsers support compression, it seems to make sense to compress static HTML pages and only inflate them (or inflate and recompress using a different algorithm) if the webbrowser does not understand the algorithm used for storage. The way this could work is to is to set a file extension (or other method) to let the webserver know the file is compressed and what algorithm is used. For example a file with the .htz extension (similar to .tgz) could indicate to Apache that the file is Gzipped. If the client understands Gzip, then the file can be delivered as is. If the client does not understand Gzip, the file would be inflated.

A mod_inflate like this would provide two benefits (a) less on-disk storage requirements and (b) lower webserver overhead when many clients understand the compression being used. Is there such a project like this? If not, should there be one?