I've been using PHP to gzip pages on the fly if the browser supports it. I put at the top of each page. (My weblog has a plugin that does it for the weblog.) You have to put a line in .htaccess for it to work on HTML pages, but that's no trouble. Putting CSS in a common external file helps. I also put my menu in a .js file. An extra bonus is not having to go into every file just to make a change. Would be nice if every server could gzip on the fly for text content. Not just for the Web, but also for email and MUDs and the such.

I notice that my line of PHP didn't go through. It would be a bit of an irony if my submission was gzipped. I'll try again, adding backslashes: \< \?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler")\; \?\>

Me again. If you View Source for this page, you'll see that the original line of PHP is in the source code, it's just not being rendered onscreen. I assume that it's not being processed by the server. Also notice that it has a Doctype of HTML 3.2, there is no CSS and Javascript is not in a .js file. There is also a span tag with two nonbreaking spaces. Sometimes you'll see a space and a slash in a br tag, sometimes you don't. i and em, and b and strong, are both used. Sometimes there's a closing /p, sometimes not. And so on. How much can the time-to-load be improved?