Clients can also negotiate the encoding of a message body. To save on network bandwidth, encodings are generally used to compress messages before they are sent. The most common algorithm for encoding is GZIP compression. Clients use the Accept-Encoding header to specify which encodings they support. For example:
GET http://example.com/stuff
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Here, the client is saying that it wants its response either compressed using GZIP or uncompressed (deflate).
The Accept-Encoding header also supports preference qualifiers:
GET http://example.com/stuff
Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, compress;0.5; deflate;q=0.1
Here, gzip is desired first, then compress, followed by deflate. In practice, clients use the Accept-Encoding header to tell the server which encoding formats they support, and they really don’t care which one the server uses.
When a client or server encodes a message body, it must set the Content-Encoding header. This tells the receiver which encoding was used.