Lossless compression method to shorten string before base64 encoding to make it shorter?

Question

just built a small webapp for previewing HTML-documents that generates URL:s containing the HTML (and all inline CSS and Javascript) in base64 encoded data. Problem is, the URL:s quickly get kinda long. What is the "de facto" standard way (preferably by Javascript) to compress the string first without data loss?

PS; I read about Huffman and Lempel-Ziv in school some time ago, and I remember really enjoying LZW :)

EDIT:

Solution found; seems like rawStr => utf8Str => lzwStr => base64Str is the way to go. I'm further working on implementing huffman compression between utf8 and lzw. Problem so far is that too many chars become very long when encoded to base64.

Answer 1

Check out this answer. It mentions functions for LZW compression/decompression (via http://jsolait.net/, specifically http://jsolait.net/browser/trunk/jsolait/lib/codecs.js).

Answer 2

You will struggle to get very much compression at all on a URL, they're too short and don't contain enough redundant information to get much benefit from Huffman / LZW style algorithms.

If you have constraints on the space of possible URLS (e.g. all content tends to be in the same set of folders) you could hard code some parts of the URLS for expansion on the client - i.e. cheat.