&gt; 1. Well, there are people who serve web fonts and CSS sprite assets to about 10¹²³ people per hour<p>Those people have the problem that the delivery mechanisms are extremely limited and hardwired and a lot of the possible advances cannot be shoehorned into a DEFLATE-compatible bytestream or whatever it is IE6 supports...<p>&gt; 2. &quot;What&#x27;s the incentive&quot; is IMNSHO a terrible question for a research area.<p>Researchers are human too. It&#x27;s demotivating to try to research fancier data compression techniques if you&#x27;re certain that no one will ever use it.