Compression reduces the size of files, in the case of Web content lowering the time it takes to download. Compression software uses complex mathematical equations to scan a file for repeating patterns in the data. It replaces the data with smaller codes that take up less room.
Let Rackspace make the difference with reliable managed hosting solutions backed by Fanatical Support.™ 100% Network Uptime Money-Back Guar., 1-hour hardware replacement, 24/7 LIVE, MS and LNX certified technical support.
While surfing the Internet, consumers will undoubtedly find text, graphics, audio and video files to download. Multimedia files can be very large, which means they move very slowly across the network. Downloading these files may take hours, depending on the speed of Internet connection. To make efficient use of disk space and to speed things up, most large files are compressed.
The most popular of compression utilities is WinZip. With over 130 million downloads WinZip allows Internet users to save storage space, dramatically reduce email transmission time and efficiently archive documents.
The program now specifically incorporates encryption algorithms to protect sensitive data. The WinZip standard even permits the creation of self-extracting archives, which turns archives into executable programs that can be opened automatically, without the aid of the main compression program.
The use of ZIP compression not only condenses the size of files, but also combines multiple freestanding files (potentially hundreds or thousands) into one archived file. This eases the transport of large files across the Web. Un-streamed multimedia files and software application set-up files are often encoded as ZIP files to facilitate easy download and deployment on a client computer.
Compression can also reduce the size of Web pages. Recently, GZIP, a Unix compression standard, has been incorporated into both Web servers and browsers. As a result, many browsers support transparent compression using GZIP.
If a compression-enabled server detects that the browser supports GZIP encoding, it can compress and send the data using the GZIP encoding at the transmission level. When the compressed data arrives at the browser, it is decompressed transparently. The traffic from the server to the browser is reduced, which can significantly shorten the load time for the page.
With the advent of specific new code in the PHP scripting environment, Web page compression can also be implemented very quickly across an entire Web site. In PHP 4.0.4, the new function "ob_gzhandler()" is designed to check the "content-encoding" transport header for deflate or GZIP indicators, and automatically compresses the output using the supported encoding. Using it is as simple as turning output buffering on, and requires only a single line of code.
For those site administrators without native compression capacity within their hosting environments, file deflation is the most selected option. File deflation is achieved with the use of an HTML compression tool. Such programs can allow Web developers to reduce the size of their Web pages by as much as 20 percent without compromising the "look and feel" of the Web pages themselves.
Using HTML compression utilities, Web pages will become much smaller, causing faster load times and saving both bandwidth and server disk space. The utilities work by simply eliminating any free space or redundant or unnecessary code within HTML or other Web files.
Redundant and unnecessary code created by some HTML editing programs can greatly increase the size of a Web site. Cumulatively, these larger file sizes can lead to greater transfer and storage costs. For this reason, especially when dealing with a large Web site without built-in compression, Web developers should consider employing HTML compression utilities. Most utilities are priced between $20 and $45.
