Managing Linux® Systems with Webmin™ System Administration and Module Development

29.15. Encodings, Character Sets, and Languages

As Section 29.12 “Adding and Editing MIME Types” explains, Apache attempts to determine a MIME type for every file that it sends to a browser. In addition to the type, files can also have an encoding that is usually used to indicate how they were compressed. The encoding is determined by the file extension (such as.gz for gzipped data) and can be used by the browser to uncompress the file before displaying it.

For example, this would allow you to create a file called foo.html.gz that contains compressed HTML data and is identified by the web server as such. For large files, sending them in compressed format can save bandwidth and reduce the time it takes for them to be downloaded. Unfortunately, ...