HTTP - How the client knows what transfer codings are accepted by the server?

Question

I know that the server can send the data to the client only with the transfer codings sfecified by the "TE" header of the request (or only chunked if no "TE" header is pressent and the client is HTTP/1.1). But, how the client knows what transfer codings are accepted by the server ? Because I understand that transfer codings can be used both ways.

Answer 1

For version 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, the chunked transfer mechanism is considered to be always acceptable, even if not listed in the TE (transfer encoding) request header field, and when used with other transfer mechanisms, should always be applied last to the transferred data and never more than one time. This transfer coding method also allows additional entity header fields to be sent after the last chunk if the client specified the "trailers" parameter as an argument of the TE field. The origin server of the response can also decide to send additional entity trailers even if the client did not specify the "trailers" option in the TE request field, but only if the metadata is optional (i.e. the client can use the received entity without them). Whenever the trailers are used, the server should list their names in the Trailer header field.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding

The client does not know which one can be used, it works under the assumption that its either chuncked or get a proper header by the webserver.