stop ignoring clients' encoding requests

2008-09-29 @ 20:51#

every time a client/UA (user-agent) makes a request to a Web server, it has the option of sending an Accept-Encoding HTTP Header. this indicates the compression format(s) the client can support. valid values are currently GZip (the most common) and Deflate. when clients send this value to your server, you need to honor it. period.

and it's not at all difficult. most all servers support automatic compression. for example, w/ Microsoft IIS, you can use configuration settings to handle compression (IIS6, IIS7). there are some messy parts when working with dynamic files and i prefer to use a tiny bit of code to handle that case myself. i provided a simple function to handle this several months ago.

bottom line? stop ignoring clients' encoding requests.

code