prefer deflate only as last resort

[dougwilson]

Sending conforming DEFLATE responses are not accepted by any version of IE (IE 11 is current as of this writing); see some convo in #25. DEFLATE is still useful for clients that only support it and there's no real reason not to support it, but may as well send gzip even if the client says it prefers deflate more, as long as the client lists that it can accept gzip.

[jonathanong]

why not just not support it and not encode it? i'd prefer that vs. lying. in other words, only check gzip.

[dougwilson]

vs. lying

How would this be lying? The server is allowed to negotiate just like the client.

why not just not support it and not encode it?

I looked at requests to our APIs and there are some Java and other non-browser clients that are only accepting deflate.

[jonathanong]

oh sorry read it wrong. thought the clients were only sending DEFLATE. SGTM :D

[dougwilson]

But yea, I think this is the best solution for the long term support :) I'm really surprised that IE 11 still doesn't work right w.r.t deflate, but LOL. I certainly don't really want to add UA sniffing in here though :D