[WWdevel] compression

[Arnold P. <ap...@ma...>]

Hi,

I have two questions about compression, one local and one global.

The local one:  In UserList.pm  you can now sort by clicking on a label 
which uses the GET method (I experimented with a POST method but it didn't 
look good). The problem is that you need to encode the user_id's of the 
visible users in the URL and MSIE has a limit of 2083 characters.  What I'm 
doing is joining the id's with ":" and passing one long string.  This way I 
can handle about 230 visible users. If the string is too long, clicking on 
a label will return all users.  Hopefully most people who are looking at a 
subset of students will be looking at fewer than 230.  What I would like to 
do is to compress the string (e.g. with the module compress::Zlib) first 
which maybe would allow 500 -700 visible users.  That would means people 
would have to install compress::Zlib.  Does anyone have an objection to 
this?  Would this be useful in other places?  Is there a better compression 
module?

The Global question.  Would it be a good idea to consider and/or experiment 
with using something like Apache::Dynagzip to compress all WeBWorK 
output?  Look at 
http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/compression/compression.html 
for a discussion of this.

Arnie


Prof. Arnold K. Pizer
Dept. of Mathematics
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
(585) 275-7767