Go for it if you're passionate about it!

I understand the principle but don't understand enough of how it would actually work to speak for it as much as I'd want to.

Such a technique could also be especially useful for low bandwidth situations, most notably Paul English's proposed Internet for Africa effort, http://joinafrica.org/ .

If you're interested in this pursuit you should also look at SPDY, Google's suggested augmentation of HTTP. It would probably speed up the web more than better compression in many cases.