List,
Before I embark on a day exploring the pros and cons of today's
cleaning/compression tools, I wondered if any of you could give me some
feedback about your own experiences within the context of medium/large scale
web sites/applications (E-Toys etc).
Is it too presumtious to expect that many users now have high speed
connections and tools that clean and/or compress html are of a small benefit
anymore? That is not to mention the proliferation of "pretty" websites with
90% graphics.
Given that gzip style compressions work very well with plain text due to
whitespace characters etc, is the combination of modules like Apach::Clean,
Apache::Compress (and Apache::Filter) an overkill. Is there really much
benefit in using Apache::Clean AND Apache::Compress (Or similar compatible
modules/technologies) with consideration of performance trade offs arising
from using these modules.
Is there any advantage to using modules like HTML::Tree or HTML::Parser to
remove information (i.e. removing autoexecuting javascript tags and any
other CSS issues) from user submitted information. Will a well designed set
of regular expressions perform this sanitisation more efficiently? Not
forgetting that not all user input arrives via a form. e.g. web mail (Though
we can thank Anomy/Spamassassin/ClamAV/MIMEDefang and others for helping out
here).
I realise this post doesn't relate directly to mod_perl per se, however
mod_perl does a great deal to encourage a high ratio of coupling to cohesion
in the way we build our applications/sites. At the same time however we
can't deny the fact that the faster we can serve our webpages the happier
our users will be.
I have been following the discussion on the list for a few months and though
threads have cropped up addressing some of these issues I haven't really
seen anyone advocate a specific stance on the situation. Perhaps someone who
has faced these decisions many times can offer some insight? I'm curious as
to whether a lot of technologies are used outside of developement. Has much
changed in the past year to make any of the above discussions especially
different?
Just please point me to online references if this has been discussed to
death.
Richard.
