I read just a few documents on multiviews and content negotiation provided by mod_negotiation, but couldn't get it to "prefer" serving .gz encoding if an uncompressed file was present. My wrong maybe, I found "LanguagePriority" but no "EncodingPriority" ?

From other documents around the web I got the impression it was mainly for languages, where you can have a file.html.eg and a file.html.fr for English and French. A quote from "<A href=http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/misc/perf-tuning.html">Apache performance notes" on the apache.org site says "If at all possible, avoid content-negotiation", and with these two problems I turned to the rewrite rule.

merlyns column uses gzip for content-type.

Tiago