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Yeah, I’m trying to imagine how this is superior to simply adding ZIP’d JSON support to your app.

It depends. My personal experience is with RINEX, a text file format for GNSS observation data. gzip compresses large sets of files by about 4x. Someone named Yuki HATANAKA came up with a compact text format (CRX) that shrinks it by about a factor of 4.1x. You can gzip CRX for a total ratio of almost 12x, or bzip3 it for a total ratio of 17x. But if you combine Hatanaka's technique (essentially higher-order delta coding) with some others, you get a binary format with a compression ratio of 19x that reads faster than the CRX text.

When one's uncompressed RINEX files are 200 GB/day, it's worth some effort to shrink the files, especially if it means they are faster to read.

If you want to be a real developer you should use raw deflate (or atleast zlib streams), they're way harder to identify so they look more really developpery.

Also gzip adds something like a dozen unnecessary bytes.

just Poob it