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Some clients are appearing on our Google App Engine instances without the Accept-Encoding header. We normally use the set a cookie with an appended iframe technique (or variation thereof) to detect these and send the correct gzipped content.
As Google App Engine does not let you control server side gzip, especially on static content, is there a specific cookie value to set which will force compression?
My gut says no. Servers only send gzipped content when they receive the correct Accept-Encoding header from the browser. The header itself is not part of the cookie sent by the browser and so you will not be able to modify it. Servers do this to prevent sending a compressed file to a browser that doesn't support it and thus preventing the page from displaying correctly.
Alternately you could do what it sounds like you already are doing and force it with server side code.
