How to set Content-Encoding with gzip

Question

I am compressing html files with gzip.
The browser (FF 3.0.10) does not decompress or display index.html.gz (pre-compressed on the server) when I request index.html

Where can I confirm the zipped header "content-encoding" and the browsers "Accept-Encoding"? (I am using the zlib API in C for zipping)

Thanks.

Answer 1

if the browser sends

Accept-Encoding: gzip

you can compress the content of your http response, not the file on the server's file system. Then in your HTTP response you must set these headers:

Content-Length: totalBytes
Content-Encoding: gzip

Answer 2

(You should also set Vary: Accept-Encoding in the response, technically, to make it clear to caches that the response will be different depending on this request header.)