Deflate + pre-defined dictionary as Protobuf alternative

[joonas-fi]

Pros:

• Removes practically all space overhead of JSON
• After deflate.Decompress(packed, sharedDictionary) you're back at human- and machine-friendly JSON

Cons:

• Your data format still enjoys the flexibility of JSON BUT needs to be somewhat fixed to enjoy the benefits of compression
• You're still transmitting text, so timestamps and numbers take quite a lot of more space than in binary

Idea for further compression: represent long strings of numbers as efficient varint, pack timestamps (RFC3339) as integer. Also floats may benefit?

HTTP Accept-Encoding: examplecompression-<immutable shared dictionary reference>