IE does not particularly like compressed CSS and JS and exhibits exactly the 
behaviour you describe when you download a compressed CSS or a compressed JS 
which compressed size is less than 5 KB (?? not sure about the number, but if 
memory serves me right it corresponds to some Windows registry setting). 
Compressing plain text or HTML works well.

In my view you have several choices:

1. If you really need to compress CSS and JS responses because most are big, 
but you have a few that are below the limit, you can pad those that are known 
to cause the problem.

2. If most CSS and JS are small, you can choose not to compress this kind of 
contents.

3. You can use mod_filter to execute the DEFLATE output-filter, you can create 
conditions on the types of contents you want to compress, and even on the size 
of each content. You can for example choose to compress CSS and JS only if the 
size exceeds a certain value.

mod_filter is an Apache 2.1/2.2 module but can relatively easily be compiled 
for Apache 2.0

You state that you have the problem even though you do not compress JS. I do 
not however know about any other issue with IE that would cause the problem you 
describe, and the problem is definitely not in Apache. I have been using 
compression a little in 2.0.47, and heavily in 2.0.49 and 2.0.54, and never 
seen the exact problem you describe caused by anything else that IE/CSS/JS. Of 
course there may be other problems related to timing, scripts expecting certain 
variables to exist that are defined in another java script that has not yet 
initialised etc., but I doubt it is in your case.

-ascs

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Werner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 7:55 AM
To: users@httpd.apache.org
Subject: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Problems with JS, IE 6.0 and mod_deflate

We are encountering a problem with IE 6.0 SP1 where it seems to have problems 
with compressed data being served from the IBM HTTP Server
2.0.47 (Apache).  Using the mod_deflate option to compress static and dynamic 
data on the run.



The problem is that the client side will "hang" and do nothing, we are not sure 
what it could be but it looks like it is related to the javascript files not 
being decompressed properly. The strange thing is that the problem appears 
semi-randomly on one client.  We have tested it on about 5 clients.  When the 
problem occurred we discovered that the last line of a javascript file is 
missing, this line only contains a closing bracket, }.  However, this file 
downloads correctly on other clients and when mod_deflate is OFF.  So when 
using the built-in script debugging tool provided with IE (or MS Office?) the 
execution works correctly until the last executable point in the file (which is 
not the last line), then the client application hangs, although IE is 
responding correctly.  This leads me to the assumption that the file is not 
decompressed properly on the client or not compressed properly on the server 
(unlikely since it only occurs for one client).



Even IBM, the providers of this Apache server are unable to solve the problem, 
see http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/httpserv/ihsdiag/deflate_diag.html
.  They reference an Apache module called mod_net_trace, but there are no other 
references to it on the web.

On the Apache server we have enabled SSL (mod_ssl), client-side caching 
(mod_expires) and compression (mod_deflate).  When we disable mod_deflate the 
client will run correctly.  We have not tried disabling mod_ssl or mod_expires. 
 Even when we disable compression for HTML and JS files the problem still 
occurs.



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