[ensembl-dev] Biomart zipped answer and biomart status/version

[Beat Wolf]

Hello,

i have three questions.
First, when using the web interface of biomart has the option to return the 
result as a zip file (or gz, i don't remember). I did not find the option to use 
this directly trough the webservice. Does somebody know the xml option used to 
acheive this?

The other question, yesterday biomart was down for maintenance. Is there a 
"standard" way to detect if biomart is down? So that i can inform the user 
that currently biomart is down. currently i just make a "random query" and 
look if the answer starts with "Query error". but this is probably wrong?

One last question. Is there a way to get the current biomart version trough 
the webservice? i cache all queries i do localy, so that they are only done 
once. obviously i have to delete that cache when the biomart version changes.

Thank you

Beat Wolf