I want to deliver huge javascript gzip compressed

What is necessary on Apache server

[jetteroheller]

I am optimizing my layout since last October.

One of the main ideas is a mouse over in the navigation.
When the user puts the mouse over a navigation link,
over the content area is a directroy of what is behind the link shown.

Just right now, there are small directory files loaded into an iframe. But this takes time.

I have now the idea to put all this small directories into the javascript.

The javascript would be about 200 kB long.
Much to long to deliver it uncompressed.

A first study shows, that GZIP would bring it down to 30 kB,
that's no problem, the current js has 24 kb.

So I aks now, what's the best way for compresseion?

Are there today browsers not able to work with compressed files?

I have read about something in Apache to deliver

my.js (when the browser can not decompress)
my.js.gz (when the browser can decompress)

What to do, to make this on Apache server?

[wildbest]

I'm doing this on PHP pages like that:

// submit gzip-ed data to user
if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start();

Make sure you put it just before any content is sent to browser!

[jetteroheller]

Thanks for this first reply.

This web site has about 40.000 visitors a month.

So I want, that I compress the javascript only at each upload and the server delivers the compressed javascript direct.

Maybe 4 updates a month, so only 4 times to compress on my computer instead of 40000 times on the server.

[jetteroheller]

Just dicovered on an other site

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} .*gzip.*
RewriteRule ^/(.*)\.js$ /$1.js.gz [L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)\.css$ /$1.css.gz [L]
AddEncoding x-gzip text.gz

I added this to the .htaccess

and put

test.js
test.js.gz

on the server.

After this, I made a page with
<script src=test.js>

The access log files of the server show,
that at my tests with MSIE 7, Crome, Firefox,
always the uncompressed test.js was delivered
instead of, like expected, test.js.gz

[Caterham]

Use a type map, they're designed for such purposes

[mrclay.org...]

[jetteroheller]

I decided now for the most simple method

AddEncoding x-gzip .js

And I modified the upload routine of my self written CMS to compress all *.js files before upload.