Earlier quoted context omitted.
almost all servers support compression nowadays, and most clients as well. The HTTP headers and such won't get compressed, but there's a very good chance that every page and text asset you get has been compressed in transit. Some servers even have the option of precompressing assets and delivering them without having to stream through a compression algorithm, but that only works with static assets.
Interesting, that second point. Wonder how it is done. Via some background process that keeps monitoring asset dirs for new files, or does the user have to run a tool for that whenever they add new assets.
However you choose to do so, i.e. usually via your deployment tool or something similar. One reference point: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_gzip_static_module.ht...