I have investigated how Microsoft IIS handles Accept-Encoding headers. Some significant detail can be found at:
http://premium.microsoft.com/msdn/library/sdkdoc/iisref/aore4mcz.htm Both static and dynamic compression are supported. Compression is handled separately from other aspects of content negotiation. There is a mechanism for ranking the "goodness" of various compression methods. Static compression involves the idea of a compression directory. Compressed files are stored there. A lazy compression scheme will service a request for a file with uncompressed data and then compress the file in the background so that it is available in compressed form for subsequent requests. It appears that the apache content negotiation mechanism may be more flexible than the IIS mechanism in that servers that service multiple accounts can be more flexibly managed. Paul
