Seb Duggan

I've been using ISAPI_Rewrite 3 for some time now to rewrite URLs on my IIS server, and generally to create SEO-friendly URLs.

One thing I only discovered today (and am blogging here mainly for my own future reference) is that for every request, the rewrite engine creates a server variable, HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL, which contains the original requested URL. It was useful for me today, as I was writing a missing page handler, but I can think of many other occasions I've had to create complicated workarounds to work out what the requested URL was.

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I've recently turned on gzip compression for all static pages on my web server running IIS6, and am now enjoying faster speeds and lower bandwidth.

However, in my investigations I came across a number of bugs in pre-SP2 IE6 (no surprises there) which means that gzipped CSS and Javascript files can be improperly cached and so intermittently mangled.

Not wanting to turn compression off just because of problems with this (thankfully declining) travesty of a browser, I hit on a way of bypassing compression for the affected browsers.

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