[thelist] Is this a good idea...or am I crazy?

[Ryan Finley]

I'm just looking for ways of compressing down the size of surveys on
SurveyMonkey.  Depending on the number of questions, there are very little
images, but 10, 20, 50K of HTML and script.

I think I'm going to try to pull out the small amount of ASP, put it in a
.JS file (which will be dynamically generated), and then try out the HTTP
Compression that is in IIS 5.0.

There can be overhead for compressing files with IIS, especially if it is
dynamic, since IIS can't really cache the compressed page.  But if I can
make the surveys themselves static (.HTM) and then use a dynamically
generated javascript include file to give me the information I need, then I
will be able to turn compression on without a huge overhead.

Here is a technote that talks about compression on IIS...not sure about
Apache:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechn
ol/iis/maintain/featusability/httpcomp.asp

Thanks,

	Ryan Finley
	President - SurveyMonkey.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Evans [mailto:chris at fuseware.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 2:30 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] Is this a good idea...or am I crazy?


I would think that the time to decompress the script would offset any gains
by downloading.  If you have tight code, most of the rendering download time
is images.  I don't think you would see much gain.

Might be interesting to try, though :)

Chris Evans
chris at fuseware.com
http://www.fuseware.com



-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Ryan Finley
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 2:56 PM
To: 'thelist at lists.evolt.org'
Subject: [thelist] Is this a good idea...or am I crazy?


Does anyone does if this has been done, and if it would be even worth it?

What if you had a simple compression algorithm, compressed your webpages,
and then had the decompression function in javascript.  The client would
download the page, the javascript decompression function would run, and
finally a document.write.  Obviously, the function would have to be fast and
small, but you could stuff it in an external javascript file for caching.

So you would just send people this:

<script src="/Decompress.js"></script>

<script>
Document.write(decompress("430ss09340sdf02302ds...2349023"));
</script>

The string is the source to the entire page in compressed format.

Am I crazy?!

Thanks,

	Ryan Finley
	President - SurveyMonkey.com

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