In "Compressing your CSS with PHP"

Oops: as you said...

fuyugare, I did get what you were saying, but really #2 and #3 do not refute anything that I wrote about, therefore, while good points, are moot to this conversation. WRT #1... Well, I get that too, however I can notice a difference at 512 when observing how a page paints (albeit very slight), so someone on dial up would probably notice an extra 30 kilobytes. I agree that, as you said, this is a hack, that Apache's modules would be the best way, and 10kb isn't much to worry about. In the end for you 30Kb isn't worth it either, and with that, I disagree. Simple as that ;-)

Hey fuyugare, WRT #1 - fine, but I can notice a difference for a couple of sites that I work on when seding the CSS compressed vs uncompressed. Certainly it is marginal, but I'm on a 512 line. I can imagine that the sites' users on dial-up (and there are quite a few) would notice it even more. #2 - Whether Doug compresses his html or not wasn't the point - I'm sure if he was worried about this stuff he'd compress the html as well. #3 - Same as #2. If he was worried about it... #4 - Not always possible, I'm afraid. I agree with you tht this isn't for everyone - I started using this for a client who's area is highly competitive and whose competitors sites tended to be heavy - the extra snap in their site was intended to keep users on site, happy etc.

Hey all, some good conversation going on here... @fuyugare: If you read the latest version of the article (and the original, I believe) you will see that I proposed this for folks who do not have access to either of the apache compression modules. As for CSS file sizes, have a look at this. I used 10kb in the Gzip article as it's a nice round number, but work on any site that has several different layout configurations and some other complex CSS going on, and you're talking about numbers much greater than 10. In fact at 40kb, you're talking about a savings of roughly 30kb. That's a significant number on a first hit to a site. @rodgerd: I'd be quite interested in hearing some numbers that you may have wrt browsers *not* caching CSS.

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