Compressing the Web

I ran across an interesting article today (at ApacheToday, also at WebReference) about an imminent change in the way Web information is served to browsers. It turns out that most browsers released since 1998 can support the HTTP 1.1 standard known as "content-encoding." If a particular server is capable of accepting "content-encoding," the data served is compressed prior to transmission. The browser then decompresses the received data and displays it on the screen.

It turns out that Internet Explorer 4 and above, and Netscape 4.5 and above support HTTP 1.1 content-encoding. If you want to test your browser, point it at http://12.17.228.52:7000/. With my connection, the test shows that I'm capable of receiving 6514.9 bytes per second uncompressed, and 29317.1 bytes per second compressed. (The idea is that the 6500 bytes of data received could be decompressed into about 29000 bytes; there's no magic going on here.) The data used for the test was Yahoo's home page, which masses 12434 bytes uncompressed, and 2480 bytes compressed.

The bad news is the most Web servers are not capable of serving compressed data. Yet. If I'm not mistaken, the article mentioned a module for Apache that would do the trick.

Sounds like a promising trend.

Cheers...