The gzip'ing is just part of the benefit. The other part is that you reduce maybe 6+ separate requests into one, and that it adds an Expires: header which essentially means that people will never need to download the javascript more than once per session.

I can't take any credit for the idea - I just took what existed in PHP and rewrote it for use on a Perl platform.

start blasphemy

Can you point me to the PHP you based it on, I've got a Drupal install that could use it.

/end blasphemy

The PHP version is written by Moxicode themselves, and is available here:

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/download.php

Ah, I didn't also realize it combines multiple files together. I do that at work with a CPP-like program that understands declarations like ///#include "foo.js".

⠤⠤ ⠙⠊⠕⠞⠁⠇⠑⠧⠊

You'd think so, but even our own Perl Monks doesn't gzip its responses:

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?

GET /index.pl? HTTP/1.1
Host: www.perlmonks.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-GB; rv:1.8.1.
+4) Gecko/20070529 SUSE/2.0.0.4-6.1 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9
+,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.7,es;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: userpass=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 10:02:51 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
[download]