I have an idea for someone to implement and give me credit for. I recently
needed to have my SSI work from a gz file. The server-intensive way to make
that work is to decompress the file to read the SSI, make the changes, then
optionally compress it again before sending it to the client. There's are
better ways, which browsers would have to be developed to support, in some
cases with no change to the servers. Since the www-html list has been giving
me trouble, I'm posting the idea to this list. The best solution requires
server support anyway.
Have the server store SSI directives and the names of the files that contain
them separately from the files when the files are compressed on the server.
If the files were uploaded already compressed, then any SSI and file names
should be uploaded separately, uncompressed. When a compressed shtml file
(with SSI) is requested by a browser, the server would process the SSI
without having to decompress the file that contains it, and would send a
supporting browser the processed SSI in addition to the main file for the
browser to combine after decompression. This could also be a security
feature because the file name could be omitted from a virtual-include
directive, and the text "virtual-include" alone could be the marker for
where the markup gets inserted, so even if the browser can't include the
markup from the SSI directive, the URL from the include won't be visible.
If the server doesn't support that and the browser receives a gzipped file
with SSI in it, the browser should check for alternative support for gzipped
SSI, which would be for the server to send an ID code with the gzipped file,
which the browser would send back to the server along with the uncompressed
SSI directive, so if the ID is correct, the server would process the SSI and
send it to the browser to be combined with the webpage.
The final backup method would require no special server support at all. The
browser would just decompress the file, request the page at the URL that's
in the SSI directive, and if HTML is served, the browser would insert it
into the webpage.
Barry
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