Does HTTP compression force chunked encoding?

Question

As I see in Transfer-length issues section 1, if transfer-length and entity-length differs the sender is not allowed to use the Content-Length header at all.

So if message has Content-Encoding header with value different than identity it cannot use Content-Length.

Does it mean chunked encoding should be ultimately specified for, say, gzipped content?

Answer 1

It seems you are (a) looking at very old documents (see RFC 7230 instead), and (b) confuse transfer codings with content codings. Use of content coding gzip doesn't require chunked transfer coding; it's just used a lot when the gzip compression happens on the fly and you don't know the content length beforehand.