Re: [tlug] Acid drop on mobile?

["Edmund Edgar" <lists@example.com>]

If you're using Apache, (which I'm guessing you are, since it's the usual thing to combine with PHP) there's a module called mod_deflate which will compress stuff for you before sending it to the client. 

Looking at that Acid Drop thing, it apparently also "minifies" - things like combining multiple css and _javascript_ files into one file, and removing white space before compressing. I wouldn't have thought these things would make much difference in most cases, but YMMV. Mod_deflate won't do this kind of thing for for you - it will just compress - and I'd assume the same goes for the lighttpd module Curt mentions. The minifying process will  _probably_ work OK, but it does give you a new and interesting way that things could conceivably break. You might be better off just cleaning up your _javascript_ and css manually...

Both the server modules and (judging by a quick glance at the source code) Acid Drop will only compress things if the client provides a header saying it supports compression, so in theory there should be no situations where compression breaks things, assuming the clients tell the truth about what they can handle and your web server / PHP scripts using the right mime headers so you don't end up compressing things that you shouldn't. But for phones, this may not provide any benefit to the end user, as there's a gateway in between which:
a) like Curt says, may be decompressing before sending to the phone
b) (I'm speculating here) may be set up to compress content before sending it to the phone already...

Let us know how you get on,

Edmund Edgar
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