Hi,
I created this ticket:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119878
The basic idea is that it shouldn't be a big problem to compress
output of api.php script using some widely available library, like
gzip.
That way the size of communication between client and server would be
much smaller and users with slow internet might benefit from this. I
am not sure how much the data would be reduced, but it could be a
significant number in some cases.
What do you think about it? Is there any reason not to do that?
Note I don't propose some breaking change, rather just create an
optional parameter "compression" that would be passed for API
requests.