Makes more sense to use the verb "negotiating" with Accept-* headers rather than "honoring".
This makes obvious sense once you consider that the client tells the server which compression formats it supports in every request yet not every data format is compressible, nor does the server necessary support any candidate compression format.
For example, the server wouldn't gzip a jpeg since it's already compressed.
All Accept-* headers are like this. e.g. the server doesn't necessarily support any of the languages requested in the Accept-Language header, but it doesn't hurt to ask. You always have to inspect the response headers to see the result of negotiation.
This makes obvious sense once you consider that the client tells the server which compression formats it supports in every request yet not every data format is compressible, nor does the server necessary support any candidate compression format.
For example, the server wouldn't gzip a jpeg since it's already compressed.
All Accept-* headers are like this. e.g. the server doesn't necessarily support any of the languages requested in the Accept-Language header, but it doesn't hurt to ask. You always have to inspect the response headers to see the result of negotiation.