title: How does server side GZipping work?
body: <p>You might know that HTML related file formats are compressed using GZip compression, server side, (by <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-gzip/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">mod_gzip</a> on Apache servers), and are decompressed by compatible browsers. (&quot;content encoding&quot;)</p>
  <p>Does this only work for HTML/XML files? Lets say my PHP/Perl file generates some simple comma delimited data, and sends that to the browser, will it be encoded by default?</p>
  <p>What about platforms like Silverlight or Flash, when they download such data will it be compressed/decompressed by the browser/runtime automatically? Is there any way to test this?</p>