Interesting. Is it possible to use it for converting HTML to XML?
I'm not really sure about that. It looks like it parses HTML into a DOM document object so I'm not sure if this can work with BaseX.
I see. So it probably sends requests headers like "Accept-Encoding: x-compress; x-zip" to the server and unzips the result, is this right?
Yes, It sends the request with Accept-Encoding for gzip, retrieves the gzipped response, and then it unzips the content into a stream.
I don’t know much about HTTP caching so far, though.
HttpClient has support for some caching libraries, which means it can download the XML files into a custom disk storage, then just check if they have changed in every document request. In case the file hasn't changed on the server that supports HTTP caching, a 304 response is returned to the client, so it doesn't need to download the file a second time.