don said:
>   Is anyone other than you familiar with all this magic?

does anyone besides the webmaster
need any knowledge of such trivia?

no.

and if you wanted to glorify it, you _could_
call it "technical details".  but it is assuredly
_not_ "magic", nor anywhere close to that...

servers these days automatically compress
whatever they send, and your browser then
decompresses it at your end; it's faster and
uses less bandwidth -- one and the same...

with a pre-compressed version of everything,
the server is saved the time and cost of doing
the compression, which adds up to an amount
that can be significant if you serve lots of stuff.

but that's all back-end crap, and has nothing
to do with the picture you paint on the front,
which orients people to your content inside...

everyone who thinks about it for a minute will
agree that you need to have addressable u.r.l.
for each scan, and they should be predictable,
from being the result of a known, dependable
naming scheme which is simple to understand.

how the files are stored is a different matter...

what matters to the end-user is what they see,
and how they grok it, and get what they want...

-bowerbird