I rather like this idea and reckon it could be a big help especially
in controlled environments where you can be sure that the browsers used to
connect to your device will support “Accept-Encoding: gzip”. If
this is the case, using the HTTPD server updates I passed to Simon recently,
you could merely add pre-compressed .gz files to your file system image and
make a small modification to httpd.c to ensure that any file with extension “.gz”
is sent with the “Content-Encoding: gzip” header. This would mean
that the device-side code didn’t ever have to unzip the files.