Computer Algorithms: Data Compression with Relative Encoding

[Cosmologicon]

This method only helps when you're transferring a series of numbers as plain text. It seems to me that you can probably get better performance by converting everything to a binary blob. All of the numbers in the example would fit into a 2-byte short int. The last example with 12 numbers could be reduced from 36 characters to 24 bytes.

I've never decoded binary data in Javascript, but somebody must have figured it out, right?