zengun

When there’s more than one way to do it, for the love of Pete, don’t use the worst way to compress your CSS files (using PHP).

Using PHP’s ob_gzhandler will indeed compress your stylesheet.
But let’s look at the costs first:

• CPU cost: PHP will have to parse a file where it only needs to execute one or two functions.
• Browser/proxy cache cost: PHP won’t send the right HTTP headers by default, so the file will never get cached right. Traffic costs will actually rise unless your visitors only visit one or two pages on your website.
• Valuable time cost: do you really want to add these lines of PHP to each and every CSS file you serve?

Horrific, isn’t it?
Instead, here’s a solution that only takes one line in your .htaccess, and mod_gzip:

mod_gzip_item_include	file	\.css$

There, instant compression on all your .css files.
This may sound like the obvious solution, but still too many are using PHP for this task because they didn’t know better, so I felt I had to blog it…