How do Content-Encoding and Transfer-Encoding differ in what they describe?
Content-Encoding is a property of the representation; Transfer-Encoding is a property of the message and may be changed in transit✓Correct answer
Both describe the message, but Content-Encoding survives caching while Transfer-Encoding does not
Both describe the representation, but Transfer-Encoding is restricted to the chunked coding
Content-Encoding is applied by intermediaries; Transfer-Encoding is applied by the origin server
Explanation
Because Content-Encoding belongs to the representation, a gzipped variant is a different representation, needing its own entity tag, and byte ranges are computed over the encoded octets. Transfer-Encoding applies only during message transfer, so any recipient along the chain may decode it or add a coding as long as the field is updated.