Stylesheets - IE6, CSS, and Gzip-Encoding

Author

IE6, CSS, and Gzip-Encoding

Martin

2005-10-04, 6:48 pm

By trial and error, I've become convinced that CSS is unsafe in IE6 when the
webserver supports GZip-encoding. There's an intermittent bug that screws
up one page draw every 20 or 30 requests. The effect is as if the CSS
stuff just wasn't there, although the web server log indicates that the
page and the stylesheet were both fetched normally.

Disabling compression on the webserver (PHP Zlib) totally fixes the problem,
at the expense of bandwidth/performance of course.

Is this a known issue?

Does anyone know of a way to report it to Microsoft?

Thanks!

Martin

2005-10-05, 6:29 pm

Martin wrote:

> By trial and error, I've become convinced that CSS is unsafe in IE6 when
> the
> webserver supports GZip-encoding. There's an intermittent bug that screws
> up one page draw every 20 or 30 requests. The effect is as if the CSS
> stuff just wasn't there, although the web server log indicates that the
> page and the stylesheet were both fetched normally.
>
> Disabling compression on the webserver (PHP Zlib) totally fixes the
> problem, at the expense of bandwidth/performance of course.
>
> Is this a known issue?
>
> Does anyone know of a way to report it to Microsoft?
>
> Thanks!

Update. Seems to be well-known in certain circles, though why MS can't fix
it is anyone's guess. In my case, caching is not an issue in the mix as
all pages are currently marked as uncachable.

Good news is that you can get away with enabling compression for everything
other than CSS files. It's just style sheets that can't be compressed for
IE6.