I’ve recently read High Performing Websites by Steve Souders and since I finished the book I’ve been using some of the suggested techniques. One of the items that I’ve had trouble with is gzipping css style sheets. I began trying to use the technique outlined here but for whatever reason I could not get it to work. So I modified that method into one that would work (for me). Personally, I feel that it is quite a bit simpler. Here is what I did. I used the same php code with one modification.
The modification that I made was the include line at the end. Instead of using
the auto_prepend_file
in my .htaccess
file I used mod_rewrite
. Here is what
I put in .htaccess
.
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)\.css$ /css/gzip-css.php?stylesheet=$2
So what happens is when the browser requests a .css file it will rewrite the url to the php script (above…saved as gzip-css.php) and pass the name of the stylesheet as a query string parameter.
In short, I ended up adding a single line of code to the php script and removing
3 lines of unfamiliar commands from .htaccess
and using a RewriteRule
(which
I was already using). It is still unintrusive to your html that is including css
files and also unintrusive to your css code. Easy to implement and simple to
maintain.