OSDev.org

I was just wondering... since processor speed is not usually at a premium when surfing the internet, but bandwidth always is, wouldn't it make sense to download website components in some kind of zipped format? I know this would only work for static pages. Also, I'm wondering if graphics files could be compressed anymore than they already are.

What do you think?

example
www.fastloadingpages.com/index.zhtml ?

in Mozilla (latest version) type in the URL "about:config" and check out "network.http.accept-encoding"

It's set to "gzip,deflate,compress;q=0.9"

slashdot along with a bunch of other sites already compress their html (their slash code produces a lot of empty spaces in the html which gzip just eats up) with gzip before passing to the browser. HTML, XML and SGML etc etc all compress very well (apparently) because of the text in tags repeating alot of the same data.

It's very obvious if you load up slashdot in lynx because it'll pass the page to gzip before rendering it.

Good idea though, just it's already been done.

Also, I think IE supports a special compressed file format that can contain pictures 'n html. It's used with HTML help but i think other sites on the internet can use it to (just with IE though).

- Nick

Yeah gzip is great, YaBBSE(this board) as well as many other sites/boards(including my own) use gzip.

Of course one of the biggest problems I ran into was browsers that don't support gzip properly. If the site doesn't check the browser to be sure it works with gzip it can turn the entire site into gibberish(the gzip code instead of the html/text).

in Mozilla (latest version) type in the URL "about:config" and check out "network.http.accept-encoding"

That's pretty helpfull, I knew that mozilla didn't support gzip... didn't know I could make it work with it though.