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I ran into a number of finicky issues building siftrss[1] a few years back. One I toiled over quite a bit was the discovery that Feedly, a very popular feed reader, does not support gzip. I haven't checked in recent years, but they may still not.

It's frustrating when you're forced to change the behavior of your "agnostic" application for the sake of a large, commonly-used third party tool in the ecosystem.

[1] https://siftrss.com/

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I don't understand how feedly is the issue here. If the client doesn't say they accept gzip encoding, why are you sending gzip encoded content? It would be slightly weird if the feedly client doesn't ask for gzip, but this is standard HTTP content negotiation.

If an HTTP server is ignoring the Accept-Encoding header and choosing to serve a Content-Encoding that the client can't accept, that is the problem here. If the server and client can't come to an agreement, isn't that the purpose of HTTP 406? But, being able to serve both gzip'd and plain text versions of an XML file doesn't seem that crazy.

I'm fuzzy on the details as it's been 5+ year since I looked at it, but it wasn't as simple as that. I think it may have been that it worked over HTTP but not HTTPS, and/or they did say that accepted it but it broke under some circumstances.

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