NAME Apache::GzipChain - compress HTML in the OutputChain SYNOPSIS In the configuration of your apache add something like SetHandler perl-script PerlHandler Apache::OutputChain Apache::GzipChain Apache::PassHtml STATUS This module is alpha software. Occasional SEGV have been observed. Use with caution! DESCRIPTION This module compresses any output from another perl handler if and only if the browser understands gzip encoding. To determine if the browser is able to understand us we check both its *Accept-Encoding* header and its *User-Agent* header. We check the latter because too few browsers send the header *Accept-Encoding* header currently. Instead I have set up an enquiry form at http://www.kulturbox.de/perl/test/content-encoding-gzip where many users can check their browsers' abilities and leave a message. Thus we can test a regular expression against the *User-Agent* header. The module seems to work without influencing the other handlers. The only thing that can be noticed by the other handler is that the response header 'Content-Encoding' has been set. If GzipChain decides not to do any compression, it just declines and doesn't even register itself for the output chain. GzipChain compresses every single buffer content it receives via the output chain separately according to the GZIP specification (RFC 1952). The compression ratio therefore suffers if the other module sends its data in very small chunks. It is recommended that you use as few as possible print statements in conjunction with the GzipChain. The Apache::PassFile module is an example of an efficient file reader for this purpose. PREREQUISITES Compress::Zlib, Apache::OutputChain AUTHOR Andreas Koenig, koenig@kulturbox.de based on code from Jan Pazdziora, adelton@fi.muni.cz