[wp-hackers] compression and caching

[Jacob Santos]

No, the merits of compressing and caching are not being debated here nor 
were they ever being debated. No one has ever said that compression or 
caching shouldn't be done. We have only been saying that there are too 
many solutions, many of them Apache or manually driven to be placed in 
WordPress itself.

I think the entire problem is that this fact alone has been pushed aside 
and provided a longer debate than what is required. What is being 
debated and often ignored is that many of the better ways to compress 
files aren't even in PHP, but Apache or some manual process and for that 
caching a file has so many solutions finding the best one for all people 
is going to be extremely large solution.

What Micah and I guess you keep coming back to is using what is said for 
Caching as if we said it for Compression and it is very annoying. I 
don't like wasting time talking to people who don't listen, so I guess 
Otto is still talking to a brick wall even now.

Finding a solution that fits one person may not be the best for another. 
Having a ton of options in WordPress may not work because it relies on 
the person knowing what they are used for. "Testing" for each feature 
may work in majority of cases, but would add a lot of time to 
development. In this realm, if someone wishes to add compression, they 
have an unlimited amount of choices (well not yet, but could in the 
future) of what they can do and what works best for them.

There is also a plugin that will minify all of your scripts on the fly 
with some file caching and expires.

Jacob Santos