Most recent browsers automatically decompresses any retrieved document before viewing it, whether it has been compressed with compress or gzip.

On a Sun SPARCstation, or even on a Pentium-based PC, the delay for decompression is barely noticeable, but on the other side, retrieval time can be much faster since compressed documents are often one third of the size of the uncompressed version. Why not save network bandwidth? If you look at Internet statistics, you will see that network traffic is increasing drammatically. Let's try to limit this increase to what is strictly necessary.

Bertrand Ibrahim <Bertrand.Ibrahim@cui.unige.ch>