> The correct behavior would be to send the compressed data along to the > browser without touching it, while setting the Transfer-Encoding HTTP > header to gzip. If the browser is incapable of handling that > Transfer-Encoding then you can unzip it yourself and send it along.
That's the right way if you're writing a browser-centric metadata system. However, the web is only one of the possible interfaces. What you're proposing would break all existing clients whenever this feature is used
