And here is some poop on performance:
I ran compress & gzip on "viola.ps" -- a postscript
file, i.e. similar to what you'd expect for typical ascii vrml.
The original file is 982507 bytes (approx 1MB, to make math easy).
compress: final size 230579 bytes
time to compress: 3.3 seconds
time to uncompress: 1.7 seconds
gzip: final file size: 158749 bytes
time to gzip: 10.9 seconds
time to gunzip: 0.8 seconds
Since final size, and decompression speed are important,
seems like gzip wins hands down.
(experiment on a pre-historic (circa 1990) IBM RS/6000 Model 520,
25 MHz, 8K cache ... still beats the pants off a pentium for mundane
tasks.)
--linas