Has anyone investigated gzip transport encoding at all? I played around with the rlreturnz stuff and it's nice and it works, but my main problem with gzip encoded content is that the browser waits until it's downloaded the entire file before it decompresses the data and begins rendering the page. A side-effect is that it makes pages appear to take longer to load, even though they take less time to download. Of course it depends on the content that was compressed in the first place, but for HTML pages it's a noticeable difference, which is why I never adopted the use of the gzip content encoding.
The other possibility I read about was using gzip for HTTP transfer encoding. So at the protocol level it would compress and stream the data (I believe...). I assume this would be pretty much transparent to the generation of HTML (or any other content) and stuffing it down the pipe and then the browser decompressing and rendering the page as it did before (without the noticeable delay). I have no idea what, if any, web browsers support this yet. Anyone got a clue or two they can share about this? - Gabriel
