I was sure I wasn't asking for GZipped response bodies. So I looked up the #HTTP RFC once more for the #AcceptEncoding #requestHeader. It lets us set the kinds of encoding we like (compress, deflate, etc.) and also set a quality indicator.

If set to 0 for an encoding, we tell the remote server not to supply it.

Yay!

Or not: the remote REST API server I was addressing responded, saying they didn't like my Accept-Encoding header.

So… then what?