RFC2068
Network Working Group R. Fielding
Request for Comments: 2068 UC Irvine
Category: Standards Track J. Gettys
J. Mogul
DEC
H. Frystyk
T. Berners-Lee
MIT/LCS
January 1997
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, object-oriented protocol which can be used for many tasks, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods. A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred.
HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This specification defines the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.1".
Contents
It is impossible for the server to accurately determine what might be
"best" for any given user, since that would require complete knowledge of both the capabilities of the user agent and the intended use for the response (e.g., does the user want to view it on screen or print it on paper?).
Having the user agent describe its capabilities in every request can
be both very inefficient (given that only a small percentage of responses have multiple representations) and a potential violation of
the user's privacy.
It complicates the implementation of an origin server and the
algorithms for generating responses to a request.
It may limit a public cache's ability to use the same response for
multiple user's requests.
HTTP/1.1 includes the following request-header fields for enabling server-driven negotiation through description of user agent capabilities and user preferences: Accept (section 14.1), Accept- Charset (section 14.2), Accept-Encoding (section 14.3), Accept- Language (section 14.4), and User-Agent (section 14.42). However, an origin server is not limited to these dimensions and MAY vary the response based on any aspect of the request, including information outside the request-header fields or within extension header fields not defined by this specification.
HTTP/1.1 origin servers MUST include an appropriate Vary header field (section 14.43) in any cachable response based on server-driven negotiation. The Vary header field describes the dimensions over which the response might vary (i.e. the dimensions over which the origin server picks its "best guess" response from multiple representations).
HTTP/1.1 public caches MUST recognize the Vary header field when it is included in a response and obey the requirements described in section 13.6 that describes the interactions between caching and content negotiation.
12.2 Agent-driven Negotiation
With agent-driven negotiation, selection of the best representation for a response is performed by the user agent after receiving an initial response from the origin server. Selection is based on a list of the available representations of the response included within the header fields (this specification reserves the field-name Alternates, as described in appendix 19.6.2.1) or entity-body of the initial response, with each representation identified by its own URI. Selection from among the representations may be performed automatically (if the user agent is capable of doing so) or manually by the user selecting from a generated (possibly hypertext) menu.
Agent-driven negotiation is advantageous when the response would vary over commonly-used dimensions (such as type, language, or encoding), when the origin server is unable to determine a user agent's capabilities from examining the request, and generally when public caches are used to distribute server load and reduce network usage.
Agent-driven negotiation suffers from the disadvantage of needing a second request to obtain the best alternate representation. This second request is only efficient when caching is used. In addition, this specification does not define any mechanism for supporting automatic selection, though it also does not prevent any such mechanism from being developed as an extension and used within HTTP/1.1.
HTTP/1.1 defines the 300 (Multiple Choices) and 406 (Not Acceptable) status codes for enabling agent-driven negotiation when the server is unwilling or unable to provide a varying response using server-driven negotiation.
12.3 Transparent Negotiation
Transparent negotiation is a combination of both server-driven and agent-driven negotiation. When a cache is supplied with a form of the list of available representations of the response (as in agent-driven negotiation) and the dimensions of variance are completely understood by the cache, then the cache becomes capable of performing server- driven negotiation on behalf of the origin server for subsequent requests on that resource.
Transparent negotiation has the advantage of distributing the negotiation work that would otherwise be required of the origin server and also removing the second request delay of agent-driven negotiation when the cache is able to correctly guess the right response.
This specification does not define any mechanism for transparent negotiation, though it also does not prevent any such mechanism from being developed as an extension and used within HTTP/1.1. An HTTP/1.1 cache performing transparent negotiation MUST include a Vary header field in the response (defining the dimensions of its variance) if it is cachable to ensure correct interoperation with all HTTP/1.1 clients. The agent-driven negotiation information supplied by the origin server SHOULD be included with the transparently negotiated response.
13 Caching in HTTP
HTTP is typically used for distributed information systems, where performance can be improved by the use of response caches. The HTTP/1.1 protocol includes a number of elements intended to make caching work as well as possible. Because these elements are inextricable from other aspects of the protocol, and because they interact with each other, it is useful to describe the basic caching design of HTTP separately from the detailed descriptions of methods,
headers, response codes, etc.
Caching would be useless if it did not significantly improve performance. The goal of caching in HTTP/1.1 is to eliminate the need to send requests in many cases, and to eliminate the need to send full responses in many other cases. The former reduces the number of network round-trips required for many operations; we use an "expiration" mechanism for this purpose (see section 13.2). The latter reduces network bandwidth requirements; we use a "validation" mechanism for this purpose (see section 13.3).
Requirements for performance, availability, and disconnected operation require us to be able to relax the goal of semantic transparency. The HTTP/1.1 protocol allows origin servers, caches, and clients to explicitly reduce transparency when necessary. However, because non-transparent operation may confuse non-expert users, and may be incompatible with certain server applications (such as those for ordering merchandise), the protocol requires that transparency be relaxed
o only by an explicit protocol-level request when relaxed by client or origin server
o only with an explicit warning to the end user when relaxed by cache or client
Therefore, the HTTP/1.1 protocol provides these important elements:
1. Protocol features that provide full semantic transparency when this is required by all parties.
2. Protocol features that allow an origin server or user agent to explicitly request and control non-transparent operation.
3. Protocol features that allow a cache to attach warnings to responses that do not preserve the requested approximation of semantic transparency.
A basic principle is that it must be possible for the clients to detect any potential relaxation of semantic transparency.
Note: The server, cache, or client implementer may be faced with design decisions not explicitly discussed in this specification. If a decision may affect semantic transparency, the implementer ought to err on the side of maintaining transparency unless a careful and complete analysis shows significant benefits in breaking transparency.
13.1.1 Cache Correctness
A correct cache MUST respond to a request with the most up-to-date response held by the cache that is appropriate to the request (see sections 13.2.5, 13.2.6, and 13.12) which meets one of the following conditions:
1. It has been checked for equivalence with what the origin server would have returned by revalidating the response with the origin server (section 13.3);
2. It is "fresh enough" (see section 13.2). In the default case, this means it meets the least restrictive freshness requirement of the client, server, and cache (see section 14.9); if the origin server so specifies, it is the freshness requirement of the origin server alone.
3. It includes a warning if the freshness demand of the client or the origin server is violated (see section 13.1.5 and 14.45).
4. It is an appropriate 304 (Not Modified), 305 (Proxy Redirect), or error (4xx or 5xx) response message.
If the cache can not communicate with the origin server, then a correct cache SHOULD respond as above if the response can be correctly served from the cache; if not it MUST return an error or
warning indicating that there was a communication failure.
If a cache receives a response (either an entire response, or a 304 (Not Modified) response) that it would normally forward to the requesting client, and the received response is no longer fresh, the cache SHOULD forward it to the requesting client without adding a new Warning (but without removing any existing Warning headers). A cache SHOULD NOT attempt to revalidate a response simply because that response became stale in transit; this might lead to an infinite loop. An user agent that receives a stale response without a Warning MAY display a warning indication to the user.
13.1.2 Warnings
Whenever a cache returns a response that is neither first-hand nor "fresh enough" (in the sense of condition 2 in section 13.1.1), it must attach a warning to that effect, using a Warning response- header. This warning allows clients to take appropriate action.
Warnings may be used for other purposes, both cache-related and otherwise. The use of a warning, rather than an error status code, distinguish these responses from true failures.
Warnings are always cachable, because they never weaken the transparency of a response. This means that warnings can be passed to HTTP/1.0 caches without danger; such caches will simply pass the warning along as an entity-header in the response.
Warnings are assigned numbers between 0 and 99. This specification defines the code numbers and meanings of each currently assigned warnings, allowing a client or cache to take automated action in some (but not all) cases.
Warnings also carry a warning text. The text may be in any appropriate natural language (perhaps based on the client's Accept headers), and include an optional indication of what character set is used.
Multiple warnings may be attached to a response (either by the origin server or by a cache), including multiple warnings with the same code number. For example, a server may provide the same warning with texts in both English and Basque.
When multiple warnings are attached to a response, it may not be practical or reasonable to display all of them to the user. This version of HTTP does not specify strict priority rules for deciding which warnings to display and in what order, but does suggest some heuristics.
The Warning header and the currently defined warnings are described in section 14.45.
13.1.3 Cache-control Mechanisms
The basic cache mechanisms in HTTP/1.1 (server-specified expiration times and validators) are implicit directives to caches. In some cases, a server or client may need to provide explicit directives to the HTTP caches. We use the Cache-Control header for this purpose.
The Cache-Control header allows a client or server to transmit a variety of directives in either requests or responses. These directives typically override the default caching algorithms. As a general rule, if there is any apparent conflict between header values, the most restrictive interpretation should be applied (that is, the one that is most likely to preserve semantic transparency). However, in some cases, Cache-Control directives are explicitly specified as weakening the approximation of semantic transparency (for example, "max-stale" or "public").
The Cache-Control directives are described in detail in section 14.9.
13.1.4 Explicit User Agent Warnings
Many user agents make it possible for users to override the basic caching mechanisms. For example, the user agent may allow the user to specify that cached entities (even explicitly stale ones) are never validated. Or the user agent might habitually add "Cache-Control: max-stale=3600" to every request. The user should have to explicitly request either non-transparent behavior, or behavior that results in abnormally ineffective caching.
If the user has overridden the basic caching mechanisms, the user agent should explicitly indicate to the user whenever this results in the display of information that might not meet the server's transparency requirements (in particular, if the displayed entity is known to be stale). Since the protocol normally allows the user agent to determine if responses are stale or not, this indication need only be displayed when this actually happens. The indication need not be a dialog box; it could be an icon (for example, a picture of a rotting fish) or some other visual indicator.
If the user has overridden the caching mechanisms in a way that would abnormally reduce the effectiveness of caches, the user agent should continually display an indication (for example, a picture of currency in flames) so that the user does not inadvertently consume excess resources or suffer from excessive latency.
13.1.5 Exceptions to the Rules and Warnings
In some cases, the operator of a cache may choose to configure it to return stale responses even when not requested by clients. This decision should not be made lightly, but may be necessary for reasons of availability or performance, especially when the cache is poorly connected to the origin server. Whenever a cache returns a stale response, it MUST mark it as such (using a Warning header). This allows the client software to alert the user that there may be a potential problem.
It also allows the user agent to take steps to obtain a first-hand or fresh response. For this reason, a cache SHOULD NOT return a stale response if the client explicitly requests a first-hand or fresh one, unless it is impossible to comply for technical or policy reasons.
13.1.6 Client-controlled Behavior
While the origin server (and to a lesser extent, intermediate caches, by their contribution to the age of a response) are the primary source of expiration information, in some cases the client may need to control a cache's decision about whether to return a cached response without validating it. Clients do this using several directives of the Cache-Control header.
A client's request may specify the maximum age it is willing to accept of an unvalidated response; specifying a value of zero forces the cache(s) to revalidate all responses. A client may also specify the minimum time remaining before a response expires. Both of these options increase constraints on the behavior of caches, and so cannot further relax the cache's approximation of semantic transparency.
A client may also specify that it will accept stale responses, up to some maximum amount of staleness. This loosens the constraints on the caches, and so may violate the origin server's specified constraints on semantic transparency, but may be necessary to support disconnected operation, or high availability in the face of poor connectivity.
13.2 Expiration Model
13.2.1 Server-Specified Expiration
HTTP caching works best when caches can entirely avoid making requests to the origin server. The primary mechanism for avoiding requests is for an origin server to provide an explicit expiration time in the future, indicating that a response may be used to satisfy subsequent requests. In other words, a cache can return a fresh
response without first contacting the server.
Our expectation is that servers will assign future explicit expiration times to responses in the belief that the entity is not likely to change, in a semantically significant way, before the expiration time is reached. This normally preserves semantic transparency, as long as the server's expiration times are carefully chosen.
The expiration mechanism applies only to responses taken from a cache and not to first-hand responses forwarded immediately to the requesting client.
If an origin server wishes to force a semantically transparent cache to validate every request, it may assign an explicit expiration time in the past. This means that the response is always stale, and so the cache SHOULD validate it before using it for subsequent requests. See section 14.9.4 for a more restrictive way to force revalidation.
If an origin server wishes to force any HTTP/1.1 cache, no matter how it is configured, to validate every request, it should use the "must-revalidate" Cache-Control directive (see section 14.9).
Servers specify explicit expiration times using either the Expires header, or the max-age directive of the Cache-Control header.
An expiration time cannot be used to force a user agent to refresh its display or reload a resource; its semantics apply only to caching mechanisms, and such mechanisms need only check a resource's expiration status when a new request for that resource is initiated. See section 13.13 for explanation of the difference between caches and history mechanisms.
13.2.2 Heuristic Expiration
Since origin servers do not always provide explicit expiration times, HTTP caches typically assign heuristic expiration times, employing algorithms that use other header values (such as the Last-Modified time) to estimate a plausible expiration time. The HTTP/1.1 specification does not provide specific algorithms, but does impose worst-case constraints on their results. Since heuristic expiration times may compromise semantic transparency, they should be used cautiously, and we encourage origin servers to provide explicit expiration times as much as possible.
13.2.3 Age Calculations
In order to know if a cached entry is fresh, a cache needs to know if its age exceeds its freshness lifetime. We discuss how to calculate the latter in section 13.2.4; this section describes how to calculate the age of a response or cache entry.
In this discussion, we use the term "now" to mean "the current value of the clock at the host performing the calculation." Hosts that use HTTP, but especially hosts running origin servers and caches, should use NTP [28] or some similar protocol to synchronize their clocks to a globally accurate time standard.
Also note that HTTP/1.1 requires origin servers to send a Date header with every response, giving the time at which the response was generated. We use the term "date_value" to denote the value of the Date header, in a form appropriate for arithmetic operations.
HTTP/1.1 uses the Age response-header to help convey age information between caches. The Age header value is the sender's estimate of the amount of time since the response was generated at the origin server. In the case of a cached response that has been revalidated with the origin server, the Age value is based on the time of revalidation, not of the original response.
In essence, the Age value is the sum of the time that the response has been resident in each of the caches along the path from the origin server, plus the amount of time it has been in transit along network paths.
We use the term "age_value" to denote the value of the Age header, in a form appropriate for arithmetic operations.
A response's age can be calculated in two entirely independent ways:
1. now minus date_value, if the local clock is reasonably well
synchronized to the origin server's clock. If the result is
negative, the result is replaced by zero.
2. age_value, if all of the caches along the response path
implement HTTP/1.1.
Given that we have two independent ways to compute the age of a response when it is received, we can combine these as
corrected_received_age = max(now - date_value, age_value)
and as long as we have either nearly synchronized clocks or all-
HTTP/1.1 paths, one gets a reliable (conservative) result.
Note that this correction is applied at each HTTP/1.1 cache along the path, so that if there is an HTTP/1.0 cache in the path, the correct received age is computed as long as the receiving cache's clock is nearly in sync. We don't need end-to-end clock synchronization (although it is good to have), and there is no explicit clock synchronization step.
Because of network-imposed delays, some significant interval may pass from the time that a server generates a response and the time it is received at the next outbound cache or client. If uncorrected, this delay could result in improperly low ages.
Because the request that resulted in the returned Age value must have been initiated prior to that Age value's generation, we can correct for delays imposed by the network by recording the time at which the request was initiated. Then, when an Age value is received, it MUST be interpreted relative to the time the request was initiated, not the time that the response was received. This algorithm results in conservative behavior no matter how much delay is experienced. So, we compute:
corrected_initial_age = corrected_received_age
+ (now - request_time)
where "request_time" is the time (according to the local clock) when the request that elicited this response was sent.
Summary of age calculation algorithm, when a cache receives a response:
/* * age_value * is the value of Age: header received by the cache with * this response. * date_value * is the value of the origin server's Date: header * request_time * is the (local) time when the cache made the request * that resulted in this cached response * response_time * is the (local) time when the cache received the * response * now * is the current (local) time */ apparent_age = max(0, response_time - date_value);
corrected_received_age = max(apparent_age, age_value); response_delay = response_time - request_time; corrected_initial_age = corrected_received_age + response_delay; resident_time = now - response_time; current_age = corrected_initial_age + resident_time;
When a cache sends a response, it must add to the corrected_initial_age the amount of time that the response was resident locally. It must then transmit this total age, using the Age header, to the next recipient cache.
Note that a client cannot reliably tell that a response is first- hand, but the presence of an Age header indicates that a response is definitely not first-hand. Also, if the Date in a response is earlier than the client's local request time, the response is probably not first-hand (in the absence of serious clock skew).
13.2.4 Expiration Calculations
In order to decide whether a response is fresh or stale, we need to compare its freshness lifetime to its age. The age is calculated as described in section 13.2.3; this section describes how to calculate the freshness lifetime, and to determine if a response has expired. In the discussion below, the values can be represented in any form appropriate for arithmetic operations.
We use the term "expires_value" to denote the value of the Expires header. We use the term "max_age_value" to denote an appropriate value of the number of seconds carried by the max-age directive of the Cache-Control header in a response (see section 14.10.
The max-age directive takes priority over Expires, so if max-age is present in a response, the calculation is simply:
freshness_lifetime = max_age_value
Otherwise, if Expires is present in the response, the calculation is:
freshness_lifetime = expires_value - date_value
Note that neither of these calculations is vulnerable to clock skew, since all of the information comes from the origin server.
If neither Expires nor Cache-Control: max-age appears in the response, and the response does not include other restrictions on caching, the cache MAY compute a freshness lifetime using a heuristic. If the value is greater than 24 hours, the cache must attach Warning 13 to any response whose age is more than 24 hours if
such warning has not already been added.
Also, if the response does have a Last-Modified time, the heuristic expiration value SHOULD be no more than some fraction of the interval since that time. A typical setting of this fraction might be 10%.
The calculation to determine if a response has expired is quite simple:
response_is_fresh = (freshness_lifetime > current_age)
13.2.5 Disambiguating Expiration Values
Because expiration values are assigned optimistically, it is possible for two caches to contain fresh values for the same resource that are different.
If a client performing a retrieval receives a non-first-hand response for a request that was already fresh in its own cache, and the Date header in its existing cache entry is newer than the Date on the new response, then the client MAY ignore the response. If so, it MAY retry the request with a "Cache-Control: max-age=0" directive (see section 14.9), to force a check with the origin server.
If a cache has two fresh responses for the same representation with different validators, it MUST use the one with the more recent Date header. This situation may arise because the cache is pooling responses from other caches, or because a client has asked for a reload or a revalidation of an apparently fresh cache entry.
13.2.6 Disambiguating Multiple Responses
Because a client may be receiving responses via multiple paths, so that some responses flow through one set of caches and other responses flow through a different set of caches, a client may receive responses in an order different from that in which the origin server sent them. We would like the client to use the most recently generated response, even if older responses are still apparently fresh.
Neither the entity tag nor the expiration value can impose an ordering on responses, since it is possible that a later response intentionally carries an earlier expiration time. However, the HTTP/1.1 specification requires the transmission of Date headers on every response, and the Date values are ordered to a granularity of one second.
When a client tries to revalidate a cache entry, and the response it receives contains a Date header that appears to be older than the one for the existing entry, then the client SHOULD repeat the request unconditionally, and include
Cache-Control: max-age=0
to force any intermediate caches to validate their copies directly with the origin server, or
Cache-Control: no-cache
to force any intermediate caches to obtain a new copy from the origin server.
If the Date values are equal, then the client may use either response (or may, if it is being extremely prudent, request a new response). Servers MUST NOT depend on clients being able to choose deterministically between responses generated during the same second, if their expiration times overlap.
13.3 Validation Model
When a cache has a stale entry that it would like to use as a response to a client's request, it first has to check with the origin server (or possibly an intermediate cache with a fresh response) to see if its cached entry is still usable. We call this "validating" the cache entry. Since we do not want to have to pay the overhead of retransmitting the full response if the cached entry is good, and we do not want to pay the overhead of an extra round trip if the cached entry is invalid, the HTTP/1.1 protocol supports the use of conditional methods.
The key protocol features for supporting conditional methods are those concerned with "cache validators." When an origin server generates a full response, it attaches some sort of validator to it, which is kept with the cache entry. When a client (user agent or proxy cache) makes a conditional request for a resource for which it has a cache entry, it includes the associated validator in the request.
The server then checks that validator against the current validator for the entity, and, if they match, it responds with a special status code (usually, 304 (Not Modified)) and no entity-body. Otherwise, it returns a full response (including entity-body). Thus, we avoid transmitting the full response if the validator matches, and we avoid an extra round trip if it does not match.
Note: the comparison functions used to decide if validators match are defined in section 13.3.3.
In HTTP/1.1, a conditional request looks exactly the same as a normal request for the same resource, except that it carries a special header (which includes the validator) that implicitly turns the method (usually, GET) into a conditional.
The protocol includes both positive and negative senses of cache- validating conditions. That is, it is possible to request either that a method be performed if and only if a validator matches or if and only if no validators match.
Note: a response that lacks a validator may still be cached, and served from cache until it expires, unless this is explicitly prohibited by a Cache-Control directive. However, a cache cannot do a conditional retrieval if it does not have a validator for the entity, which means it will not be refreshable after it expires.
13.3.1 Last-modified Dates
The Last-Modified entity-header field value is often used as a cache validator. In simple terms, a cache entry is considered to be valid if the entity has not been modified since the Last-Modified value.
13.3.2 Entity Tag Cache Validators
The ETag entity-header field value, an entity tag, provides for an "opaque" cache validator. This may allow more reliable validation in situations where it is inconvenient to store modification dates, where the one-second resolution of HTTP date values is not sufficient, or where the origin server wishes to avoid certain paradoxes that may arise from the use of modification dates.
Entity Tags are described in section 3.11. The headers used with entity tags are described in sections 14.20, 14.25, 14.26 and 14.43.
13.3.3 Weak and Strong Validators
Since both origin servers and caches will compare two validators to decide if they represent the same or different entities, one normally would expect that if the entity (the entity-body or any entity- headers) changes in any way, then the associated validator would change as well. If this is true, then we call this validator a "strong validator."
However, there may be cases when a server prefers to change the validator only on semantically significant changes, and not when
insignificant aspects of the entity change. A validator that does not always change when the resource changes is a "weak validator."
Entity tags are normally "strong validators," but the protocol provides a mechanism to tag an entity tag as "weak." One can think of a strong validator as one that changes whenever the bits of an entity changes, while a weak value changes whenever the meaning of an entity changes. Alternatively, one can think of a strong validator as part of an identifier for a specific entity, while a weak validator is part of an identifier for a set of semantically equivalent entities.
Note: One example of a strong validator is an integer that is incremented in stable storage every time an entity is changed.
An entity's modification time, if represented with one-second resolution, could be a weak validator, since it is possible that the resource may be modified twice during a single second.
Support for weak validators is optional; however, weak validators allow for more efficient caching of equivalent objects; for example, a hit counter on a site is probably good enough if it is updated every few days or weeks, and any value during that period is likely "good enough" to be equivalent.
A "use" of a validator is either when a client generates a request and includes the validator in a validating header field, or when a server compares two validators.
Strong validators are usable in any context. Weak validators are only usable in contexts that do not depend on exact equality of an entity. For example, either kind is usable for a conditional GET of a full entity. However, only a strong validator is usable for a sub-range retrieval, since otherwise the client may end up with an internally inconsistent entity.
The only function that the HTTP/1.1 protocol defines on validators is comparison. There are two validator comparison functions, depending on whether the comparison context allows the use of weak validators or not:
o The strong comparison function: in order to be considered equal, both validators must be identical in every way, and neither may be weak. o The weak comparison function: in order to be considered equal, both validators must be identical in every way, but either or both of them may be tagged as "weak" without affecting the result.
The weak comparison function MAY be used for simple (non-subrange)
GET requests. The strong comparison function MUST be used in all other cases.
An entity tag is strong unless it is explicitly tagged as weak. Section 3.11 gives the syntax for entity tags.
A Last-Modified time, when used as a validator in a request, is implicitly weak unless it is possible to deduce that it is strong, using the following rules:
o The validator is being compared by an origin server to the actual current validator for the entity and, o That origin server reliably knows that the associated entity did not change twice during the second covered by the presented validator.
or
o The validator is about to be used by a client in an If-Modified- Since or If-Unmodified-Since header, because the client has a cache entry for the associated entity, and o That cache entry includes a Date value, which gives the time when the origin server sent the original response, and o The presented Last-Modified time is at least 60 seconds before the Date value.
or
o The validator is being compared by an intermediate cache to the validator stored in its cache entry for the entity, and o That cache entry includes a Date value, which gives the time when the origin server sent the original response, and o The presented Last-Modified time is at least 60 seconds before the Date value.
This method relies on the fact that if two different responses were sent by the origin server during the same second, but both had the same Last-Modified time, then at least one of those responses would have a Date value equal to its Last-Modified time. The arbitrary 60- second limit guards against the possibility that the Date and Last- Modified values are generated from different clocks, or at somewhat different times during the preparation of the response. An implementation may use a value larger than 60 seconds, if it is believed that 60 seconds is too short.
If a client wishes to perform a sub-range retrieval on a value for which it has only a Last-Modified time and no opaque validator, it may do this only if the Last-Modified time is strong in the sense described here.
A cache or origin server receiving a cache-conditional request, other
than a full-body GET request, MUST use the strong comparison function
to evaluate the condition.
These rules allow HTTP/1.1 caches and clients to safely perform sub- range retrievals on values that have been obtained from HTTP/1.0 servers.
13.3.4 Rules for When to Use Entity Tags and Last-modified Dates
We adopt a set of rules and recommendations for origin servers, clients, and caches regarding when various validator types should be used, and for what purposes.
HTTP/1.1 origin servers:
o SHOULD send an entity tag validator unless it is not feasible to generate one. o MAY send a weak entity tag instead of a strong entity tag, if performance considerations support the use of weak entity tags, or if it is unfeasible to send a strong entity tag. o SHOULD send a Last-Modified value if it is feasible to send one, unless the risk of a breakdown in semantic transparency that could result from using this date in an If-Modified-Since header would lead to serious problems.
In other words, the preferred behavior for an HTTP/1.1 origin server is to send both a strong entity tag and a Last-Modified value.
In order to be legal, a strong entity tag MUST change whenever the associated entity value changes in any way. A weak entity tag SHOULD change whenever the associated entity changes in a semantically significant way.
Note: in order to provide semantically transparent caching, an origin server must avoid reusing a specific strong entity tag value for two different entities, or reusing a specific weak entity tag value for two semantically different entities. Cache entries may persist for arbitrarily long periods, regardless of expiration times, so it may be inappropriate to expect that a cache will never again attempt to validate an entry using a validator that it obtained at some point in the past.
HTTP/1.1 clients:
o If an entity tag has been provided by the origin server, MUST
use that entity tag in any cache-conditional request (using
If-Match or If-None-Match).
o If only a Last-Modified value has been provided by the origin
server, SHOULD use that value in non-subrange cache-conditional
requests (using If-Modified-Since).
o If only a Last-Modified value has been provided by an HTTP/1.0
origin server, MAY use that value in subrange cache-conditional
requests (using If-Unmodified-Since:). The user agent should
provide a way to disable this, in case of difficulty.
o If both an entity tag and a Last-Modified value have been
provided by the origin server, SHOULD use both validators in
cache-conditional requests. This allows both HTTP/1.0 and
HTTP/1.1 caches to respond appropriately.
An HTTP/1.1 cache, upon receiving a request, MUST use the most restrictive validator when deciding whether the client's cache entry matches the cache's own cache entry. This is only an issue when the request contains both an entity tag and a last-modified-date validator (If-Modified-Since or If-Unmodified-Since).
A note on rationale: The general principle behind these rules is that HTTP/1.1 servers and clients should transmit as much non- redundant information as is available in their responses and requests. HTTP/1.1 systems receiving this information will make the most conservative assumptions about the validators they receive.
HTTP/1.0 clients and caches will ignore entity tags. Generally, last-modified values received or used by these systems will support transparent and efficient caching, and so HTTP/1.1 origin servers should provide Last-Modified values. In those rare cases where the use of a Last-Modified value as a validator by an HTTP/1.0 system could result in a serious problem, then HTTP/1.1 origin servers should not provide one.
13.3.5 Non-validating Conditionals
The principle behind entity tags is that only the service author knows the semantics of a resource well enough to select an appropriate cache validation mechanism, and the specification of any validator comparison function more complex than byte-equality would open up a can of worms. Thus, comparisons of any other headers (except Last-Modified, for compatibility with HTTP/1.0) are never used for purposes of validating a cache entry.
13.4 Response Cachability
Unless specifically constrained by a Cache-Control (section 14.9) directive, a caching system may always store a successful response (see section 13.8) as a cache entry, may return it without validation if it is fresh, and may return it after successful validation. If
there is neither a cache validator nor an explicit expiration time associated with a response, we do not expect it to be cached, but certain caches may violate this expectation (for example, when little or no network connectivity is available). A client can usually detect that such a response was taken from a cache by comparing the Date header to the current time.
Note that some HTTP/1.0 caches are known to violate this expectation without providing any Warning.
However, in some cases it may be inappropriate for a cache to retain an entity, or to return it in response to a subsequent request. This may be because absolute semantic transparency is deemed necessary by the service author, or because of security or privacy considerations. Certain Cache-Control directives are therefore provided so that the server can indicate that certain resource entities, or portions thereof, may not be cached regardless of other considerations.
Note that section 14.8 normally prevents a shared cache from saving and returning a response to a previous request if that request included an Authorization header.
A response received with a status code of 200, 203, 206, 300, 301 or 410 may be stored by a cache and used in reply to a subsequent request, subject to the expiration mechanism, unless a Cache-Control directive prohibits caching. However, a cache that does not support the Range and Content-Range headers MUST NOT cache 206 (Partial Content) responses.
A response received with any other status code MUST NOT be returned in a reply to a subsequent request unless there are Cache-Control directives or another header(s) that explicitly allow it. For example, these include the following: an Expires header (section 14.21); a "max-age", "must-revalidate", "proxy-revalidate", "public" or "private" Cache-Control directive (section 14.9).
13.5 Constructing Responses From Caches
The purpose of an HTTP cache is to store information received in response to requests, for use in responding to future requests. In many cases, a cache simply returns the appropriate parts of a response to the requester. However, if the cache holds a cache entry based on a previous response, it may have to combine parts of a new response with what is held in the cache entry.
13.5.1 End-to-end and Hop-by-hop Headers
For the purpose of defining the behavior of caches and non-caching proxies, we divide HTTP headers into two categories:
o End-to-end headers, which must be transmitted to the ultimate recipient of a request or response. End-to-end headers in responses must be stored as part of a cache entry and transmitted in any response formed from a cache entry. o Hop-by-hop headers, which are meaningful only for a single transport-level connection, and are not stored by caches or forwarded by proxies.
The following HTTP/1.1 headers are hop-by-hop headers:
o Connection o Keep-Alive o Public o Proxy-Authenticate o Transfer-Encoding o Upgrade
All other headers defined by HTTP/1.1 are end-to-end headers.
Hop-by-hop headers introduced in future versions of HTTP MUST be listed in a Connection header, as described in section 14.10.
13.5.2 Non-modifiable Headers
Some features of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, such as Digest Authentication, depend on the value of certain end-to-end headers. A cache or non-caching proxy SHOULD NOT modify an end-to-end header unless the definition of that header requires or specifically allows that.
A cache or non-caching proxy MUST NOT modify any of the following fields in a request or response, nor may it add any of these fields if not already present:
o Content-Location o ETag o Expires o Last-Modified
A cache or non-caching proxy MUST NOT modify or add any of the
following fields in a response that contains the no-transform Cache-
Control directive, or in any request:
o Content-Encoding o Content-Length o Content-Range o Content-Type
A cache or non-caching proxy MAY modify or add these fields in a response that does not include no-transform, but if it does so, it MUST add a Warning 14 (Transformation applied) if one does not already appear in the response.
Warning: unnecessary modification of end-to-end headers may cause authentication failures if stronger authentication mechanisms are introduced in later versions of HTTP. Such authentication mechanisms may rely on the values of header fields not listed here.
13.5.3 Combining Headers
When a cache makes a validating request to a server, and the server provides a 304 (Not Modified) response, the cache must construct a response to send to the requesting client. The cache uses the entity-body stored in the cache entry as the entity-body of this outgoing response. The end-to-end headers stored in the cache entry are used for the constructed response, except that any end-to-end headers provided in the 304 response MUST replace the corresponding headers from the cache entry. Unless the cache decides to remove the cache entry, it MUST also replace the end-to-end headers stored with the cache entry with corresponding headers received in the incoming response.
In other words, the set of end-to-end headers received in the incoming response overrides all corresponding end-to-end headers stored with the cache entry. The cache may add Warning headers (see section 14.45) to this set.
If a header field-name in the incoming response matches more than one header in the cache entry, all such old headers are replaced.
Note: this rule allows an origin server to use a 304 (Not Modified) response to update any header associated with a previous response for the same entity, although it might not always be meaningful or correct to do so. This rule does not allow an origin server to use a 304 (not Modified) response to entirely delete a header that it had provided with a previous response.
13.5.4 Combining Byte Ranges
A response may transfer only a subrange of the bytes of an entity- body, either because the request included one or more Range specifications, or because a connection was broken prematurely. After several such transfers, a cache may have received several ranges of the same entity-body.
If a cache has a stored non-empty set of subranges for an entity, and an incoming response transfers another subrange, the cache MAY combine the new subrange with the existing set if both the following conditions are met:
o Both the incoming response and the cache entry must have a cache
validator.
o The two cache validators must match using the strong comparison
function (see section 13.3.3).
If either requirement is not meant, the cache must use only the most recent partial response (based on the Date values transmitted with every response, and using the incoming response if these values are equal or missing), and must discard the other partial information.
13.6 Caching Negotiated Responses
Use of server-driven content negotiation (section 12), as indicated by the presence of a Vary header field in a response, alters the conditions and procedure by which a cache can use the response for subsequent requests.
A server MUST use the Vary header field (section 14.43) to inform a cache of what header field dimensions are used to select among multiple representations of a cachable response. A cache may use the selected representation (the entity included with that particular response) for replying to subsequent requests on that resource only when the subsequent requests have the same or equivalent values for all header fields specified in the Vary response-header. Requests with a different value for one or more of those header fields would be forwarded toward the origin server.
If an entity tag was assigned to the representation, the forwarded request SHOULD be conditional and include the entity tags in an If- None-Match header field from all its cache entries for the Request- URI. This conveys to the server the set of entities currently held by the cache, so that if any one of these entities matches the requested entity, the server can use the ETag header in its 304 (Not Modified) response to tell the cache which entry is appropriate. If the entity-tag of the new response matches that of an existing entry, the
new response SHOULD be used to update the header fields of the existing entry, and the result MUST be returned to the client.
The Vary header field may also inform the cache that the representation was selected using criteria not limited to the request-headers; in this case, a cache MUST NOT use the response in a reply to a subsequent request unless the cache relays the new request to the origin server in a conditional request and the server responds with 304 (Not Modified), including an entity tag or Content-Location that indicates which entity should be used.
If any of the existing cache entries contains only partial content for the associated entity, its entity-tag SHOULD NOT be included in the If-None-Match header unless the request is for a range that would be fully satisfied by that entry.
If a cache receives a successful response whose Content-Location field matches that of an existing cache entry for the same Request- URI, whose entity-tag differs from that of the existing entry, and whose Date is more recent than that of the existing entry, the existing entry SHOULD NOT be returned in response to future requests, and should be deleted from the cache.
13.7 Shared and Non-Shared Caches
For reasons of security and privacy, it is necessary to make a distinction between "shared" and "non-shared" caches. A non-shared cache is one that is accessible only to a single user. Accessibility in this case SHOULD be enforced by appropriate security mechanisms. All other caches are considered to be "shared." Other sections of this specification place certain constraints on the operation of shared caches in order to prevent loss of privacy or failure of access controls.
13.8 Errors or Incomplete Response Cache Behavior
A cache that receives an incomplete response (for example, with fewer bytes of data than specified in a Content-Length header) may store the response. However, the cache MUST treat this as a partial response. Partial responses may be combined as described in section 13.5.4; the result might be a full response or might still be partial. A cache MUST NOT return a partial response to a client without explicitly marking it as such, using the 206 (Partial Content) status code. A cache MUST NOT return a partial response using a status code of 200 (OK).
If a cache receives a 5xx response while attempting to revalidate an entry, it may either forward this response to the requesting client,
or act as if the server failed to respond. In the latter case, it MAY return a previously received response unless the cached entry includes the "must-revalidate" Cache-Control directive (see section 14.9).
13.9 Side Effects of GET and HEAD
Unless the origin server explicitly prohibits the caching of their responses, the application of GET and HEAD methods to any resources SHOULD NOT have side effects that would lead to erroneous behavior if these responses are taken from a cache. They may still have side effects, but a cache is not required to consider such side effects in its caching decisions. Caches are always expected to observe an origin server's explicit restrictions on caching.
We note one exception to this rule: since some applications have traditionally used GETs and HEADs with query URLs (those containing a "?" in the rel_path part) to perform operations with significant side effects, caches MUST NOT treat responses to such URLs as fresh unless the server provides an explicit expiration time. This specifically means that responses from HTTP/1.0 servers for such URIs should not be taken from a cache. See section 9.1.1 for related information.
13.10 Invalidation After Updates or Deletions
The effect of certain methods at the origin server may cause one or more existing cache entries to become non-transparently invalid. That is, although they may continue to be "fresh," they do not accurately reflect what the origin server would return for a new request.
There is no way for the HTTP protocol to guarantee that all such cache entries are marked invalid. For example, the request that caused the change at the origin server may not have gone through the proxy where a cache entry is stored. However, several rules help reduce the likelihood of erroneous behavior.
In this section, the phrase "invalidate an entity" means that the cache should either remove all instances of that entity from its storage, or should mark these as "invalid" and in need of a mandatory revalidation before they can be returned in response to a subsequent request.
Some HTTP methods may invalidate an entity. This is either the entity
referred to by the Request-URI, or by the Location or Content-
Location response-headers (if present). These methods are:
o PUT o DELETE o POST
In order to prevent denial of service attacks, an invalidation based on the URI in a Location or Content-Location header MUST only be performed if the host part is the same as in the Request-URI.
13.11 Write-Through Mandatory
All methods that may be expected to cause modifications to the origin server's resources MUST be written through to the origin server. This currently includes all methods except for GET and HEAD. A cache MUST NOT reply to such a request from a client before having transmitted the request to the inbound server, and having received a corresponding response from the inbound server. This does not prevent a cache from sending a 100 (Continue) response before the inbound server has replied.
The alternative (known as "write-back" or "copy-back" caching) is not allowed in HTTP/1.1, due to the difficulty of providing consistent updates and the problems arising from server, cache, or network failure prior to write-back.
13.12 Cache Replacement
If a new cachable (see sections 14.9.2, 13.2.5, 13.2.6 and 13.8) response is received from a resource while any existing responses for the same resource are cached, the cache SHOULD use the new response to reply to the current request. It may insert it into cache storage and may, if it meets all other requirements, use it to respond to any future requests that would previously have caused the old response to be returned. If it inserts the new response into cache storage it should follow the rules in section 13.5.3.
Note: a new response that has an older Date header value than existing cached responses is not cachable.
13.13 History Lists
User agents often have history mechanisms, such as "Back" buttons and history lists, which can be used to redisplay an entity retrieved earlier in a session.
History mechanisms and caches are different. In particular history
mechanisms SHOULD NOT try to show a semantically transparent view of
the current state of a resource. Rather, a history mechanism is meant
to show exactly what the user saw at the time when the resource was
retrieved.
By default, an expiration time does not apply to history mechanisms. If the entity is still in storage, a history mechanism should display it even if the entity has expired, unless the user has specifically configured the agent to refresh expired history documents.
This should not be construed to prohibit the history mechanism from telling the user that a view may be stale.
Note: if history list mechanisms unnecessarily prevent users from viewing stale resources, this will tend to force service authors to avoid using HTTP expiration controls and cache controls when they would otherwise like to. Service authors may consider it important that users not be presented with error messages or warning messages when they use navigation controls (such as BACK) to view previously fetched resources. Even though sometimes such resources ought not to cached, or ought to expire quickly, user interface considerations may force service authors to resort to other means of preventing caching (e.g. "once-only" URLs) in order not to suffer the effects of improperly functioning history mechanisms.
14 Header Field Definitions
This section defines the syntax and semantics of all standard HTTP/1.1 header fields. For entity-header fields, both sender and recipient refer to either the client or the server, depending on who sends and who receives the entity.
14.1 Accept
The Accept request-header field can be used to specify certain media types which are acceptable for the response. Accept headers can be used to indicate that the request is specifically limited to a small set of desired types, as in the case of a request for an in-line image.
Accept = "Accept" ":"
#( media-range [ accept-params ] )
media-range = ( "*/*"
| ( type "/" "*" )
| ( type "/" subtype )
) *( ";" parameter )
accept-params = ";" "q" "=" qvalue *( accept-extension )
accept-extension = ";" token [ "=" ( token | quoted-string ) ]
The asterisk "*" character is used to group media types into ranges, with "*/*" indicating all media types and "type/*" indicating all subtypes of that type. The media-range MAY include media type parameters that are applicable to that range.
Each media-range MAY be followed by one or more accept-params, beginning with the "q" parameter for indicating a relative quality factor. The first "q" parameter (if any) separates the media-range parameter(s) from the accept-params. Quality factors allow the user or user agent to indicate the relative degree of preference for that media-range, using the qvalue scale from 0 to 1 (section 3.9). The default value is q=1.
Note: Use of the "q" parameter name to separate media type parameters from Accept extension parameters is due to historical practice. Although this prevents any media type parameter named "q" from being used with a media range, such an event is believed to be unlikely given the lack of any "q" parameters in the IANA media type registry and the rare usage of any media type parameters in Accept. Future media types should be discouraged from registering any parameter named "q".
The example
Accept: audio/*; q=0.2, audio/basic
SHOULD be interpreted as "I prefer audio/basic, but send me any audio type if it is the best available after an 80% mark-down in quality."
If no Accept header field is present, then it is assumed that the client accepts all media types. If an Accept header field is present, and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable according to the combined Accept field value, then the server SHOULD send a 406 (not acceptable) response.
A more elaborate example is
Accept: text/plain; q=0.5, text/html,
text/x-dvi; q=0.8, text/x-c
Verbally, this would be interpreted as "text/html and text/x-c are the preferred media types, but if they do not exist, then send the text/x-dvi entity, and if that does not exist, send the text/plain entity."
Media ranges can be overridden by more specific media ranges or specific media types. If more than one media range applies to a given type, the most specific reference has precedence. For example,
Accept: text/*, text/html, text/html;level=1, */*
have the following precedence:
1) text/html;level=1
2) text/html
3) text/*
4) */*
The media type quality factor associated with a given type is determined by finding the media range with the highest precedence which matches that type. For example,
Accept: text/*;q=0.3, text/html;q=0.7, text/html;level=1,
text/html;level=2;q=0.4, */*;q=0.5
would cause the following values to be associated:
text/html;level=1 = 1
text/html = 0.7
text/plain = 0.3
image/jpeg = 0.5
text/html;level=2 = 0.4
text/html;level=3 = 0.7
Note: A user agent may be provided with a default set of quality values for certain media ranges. However, unless the user agent is a closed system which cannot interact with other rendering agents,
this default set should be configurable by the user.
14.2 Accept-Charset
The Accept-Charset request-header field can be used to indicate what character sets are acceptable for the response. This field allows clients capable of understanding more comprehensive or special- purpose character sets to signal that capability to a server which is capable of representing documents in those character sets. The ISO- 8859-1 character set can be assumed to be acceptable to all user agents.
Accept-Charset = "Accept-Charset" ":"
1#( charset [ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ] )
Character set values are described in section 3.4. Each charset may be given an associated quality value which represents the user's preference for that charset. The default value is q=1. An example is
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5, unicode-1-1;q=0.8
If no Accept-Charset header is present, the default is that any character set is acceptable. If an Accept-Charset header is present, and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable according to the Accept-Charset header, then the server SHOULD send an error response with the 406 (not acceptable) status code, though the sending of an unacceptable response is also allowed.
14.3 Accept-Encoding
The Accept-Encoding request-header field is similar to Accept, but restricts the content-coding values (section 14.12) which are acceptable in the response.
Accept-Encoding = "Accept-Encoding" ":"
#( content-coding )
An example of its use is
Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip
If no Accept-Encoding header is present in a request, the server MAY assume that the client will accept any content coding. If an Accept- Encoding header is present, and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable according to the Accept-Encoding header, then the server SHOULD send an error response with the 406 (Not Acceptable) status code.
An empty Accept-Encoding value indicates none are acceptable.
14.4 Accept-Language
The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a response to the request.
Accept-Language = "Accept-Language" ":"
1#( language-range [ ";" "q" "=" qvalue ] )
language-range = ( ( 1*8ALPHA *( "-" 1*8ALPHA ) ) | "*" )
Each language-range MAY be given an associated quality value which represents an estimate of the user's preference for the languages specified by that range. The quality value defaults to "q=1". For example,
Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7
would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept British English and other types of English." A language-range matches a language-tag if it exactly equals the tag, or if it exactly equals a prefix of the tag such that the first tag character following the prefix is "-". The special range "*", if present in the Accept-Language field, matches every tag not matched by any other range present in the Accept-Language field.
Note: This use of a prefix matching rule does not imply that language tags are assigned to languages in such a way that it is always true that if a user understands a language with a certain tag, then this user will also understand all languages with tags for which this tag is a prefix. The prefix rule simply allows the use of prefix tags if this is the case.
The language quality factor assigned to a language-tag by the Accept-Language field is the quality value of the longest language- range in the field that matches the language-tag. If no language- range in the field matches the tag, the language quality factor assigned is 0. If no Accept-Language header is present in the request, the server SHOULD assume that all languages are equally acceptable. If an Accept-Language header is present, then all languages which are assigned a quality factor greater than 0 are acceptable.
It may be contrary to the privacy expectations of the user to send an Accept-Language header with the complete linguistic preferences of the user in every request. For a discussion of this issue, see
section 15.7.
Note: As intelligibility is highly dependent on the individual user, it is recommended that client applications make the choice of linguistic preference available to the user. If the choice is not made available, then the Accept-Language header field must not be given in the request.
14.5 Accept-Ranges
The Accept-Ranges response-header field allows the server to indicate its acceptance of range requests for a resource:
Accept-Ranges = "Accept-Ranges" ":" acceptable-ranges
acceptable-ranges = 1#range-unit | "none"
Origin servers that accept byte-range requests MAY send
Accept-Ranges: bytes
but are not required to do so. Clients MAY generate byte-range requests without having received this header for the resource involved.
Servers that do not accept any kind of range request for a resource MAY send
Accept-Ranges: none
to advise the client not to attempt a range request.
14.6 Age
The Age response-header field conveys the sender's estimate of the amount of time since the response (or its revalidation) was generated at the origin server. A cached response is "fresh" if its age does not exceed its freshness lifetime. Age values are calculated as specified in section 13.2.3.
Age = "Age" ":" age-value
age-value = delta-seconds
Age values are non-negative decimal integers, representing time in seconds.
If a cache receives a value larger than the largest positive integer it can represent, or if any of its age calculations overflows, it MUST transmit an Age header with a value of 2147483648 (2^31). HTTP/1.1 caches MUST send an Age header in every response. Caches SHOULD use an arithmetic type of at least 31 bits of range.
14.7 Allow
The Allow entity-header field lists the set of methods supported by the resource identified by the Request-URI. The purpose of this field is strictly to inform the recipient of valid methods associated with the resource. An Allow header field MUST be present in a 405 (Method Not Allowed) response.
Allow = "Allow" ":" 1#method
Example of use:
Allow: GET, HEAD, PUT
This field cannot prevent a client from trying other methods. However, the indications given by the Allow header field value SHOULD be followed. The actual set of allowed methods is defined by the origin server at the time of each request.
The Allow header field MAY be provided with a PUT request to recommend the methods to be supported by the new or modified resource. The server is not required to support these methods and SHOULD include an Allow header in the response giving the actual supported methods.
A proxy MUST NOT modify the Allow header field even if it does not understand all the methods specified, since the user agent MAY have other means of communicating with the origin server.
The Allow header field does not indicate what methods are implemented at the server level. Servers MAY use the Public response-header field (section 14.35) to describe what methods are implemented on the server as a whole.
14.8 Authorization
A user agent that wishes to authenticate itself with a server-- usually, but not necessarily, after receiving a 401 response--MAY do so by including an Authorization request-header field with the request. The Authorization field value consists of credentials containing the authentication information of the user agent for the realm of the resource being requested.
Authorization = "Authorization" ":" credentials
HTTP access authentication is described in section 11. If a request is authenticated and a realm specified, the same credentials SHOULD be valid for all other requests within this realm.
When a shared cache (see section 13.7) receives a request containing an Authorization field, it MUST NOT return the corresponding response as a reply to any other request, unless one of the following specific exceptions holds:
1. If the response includes the "proxy-revalidate" Cache-Control
directive, the cache MAY use that response in replying to a
subsequent request, but a proxy cache MUST first revalidate it with
the origin server, using the request-headers from the new request
to allow the origin server to authenticate the new request.
2. If the response includes the "must-revalidate" Cache-Control
directive, the cache MAY use that response in replying to a
subsequent request, but all caches MUST first revalidate it with
the origin server, using the request-headers from the new request
to allow the origin server to authenticate the new request.
3. If the response includes the "public" Cache-Control directive, it
may be returned in reply to any subsequent request.
14.9 Cache-Control
The Cache-Control general-header field is used to specify directives that MUST be obeyed by all caching mechanisms along the request/response chain. The directives specify behavior intended to prevent caches from adversely interfering with the request or response. These directives typically override the default caching algorithms. Cache directives are unidirectional in that the presence of a directive in a request does not imply that the same directive should be given in the response.
Note that HTTP/1.0 caches may not implement Cache-Control and may only implement Pragma: no-cache (see section 14.32).
Cache directives must be passed through by a proxy or gateway application, regardless of their significance to that application, since the directives may be applicable to all recipients along the request/response chain. It is not possible to specify a cache- directive for a specific cache.
Cache-Control = "Cache-Control" ":" 1#cache-directive
cache-directive = cache-request-directive
| cache-response-directive
cache-request-directive =
"no-cache" [ "=" <"> 1#field-name <"> ]
| "no-store"
| "max-age" "=" delta-seconds
| "max-stale" [ "=" delta-seconds ]
| "min-fresh" "=" delta-seconds
| "only-if-cached"
| cache-extension
cache-response-directive =
"public"
| "private" [ "=" <"> 1#field-name <"> ]
| "no-cache" [ "=" <"> 1#field-name <"> ]
| "no-store"
| "no-transform"
| "must-revalidate"
| "proxy-revalidate"
| "max-age" "=" delta-seconds
| cache-extension
cache-extension = token [ "=" ( token | quoted-string ) ]
When a directive appears without any 1#field-name parameter, the directive applies to the entire request or response. When such a directive appears with a 1#field-name parameter, it applies only to the named field or fields, and not to the rest of the request or response. This mechanism supports extensibility; implementations of future versions of the HTTP protocol may apply these directives to header fields not defined in HTTP/1.1.
The cache-control directives can be broken down into these general categories:
o Restrictions on what is cachable; these may only be imposed by the
origin server.
o Restrictions on what may be stored by a cache; these may be imposed
by either the origin server or the user agent.
o Modifications of the basic expiration mechanism; these may be
imposed by either the origin server or the user agent.
o Controls over cache revalidation and reload; these may only be
imposed by a user agent.
o Control over transformation of entities.
o Extensions to the caching system.
14.9.1 What is Cachable
By default, a response is cachable if the requirements of the request method, request header fields, and the response status indicate that it is cachable. Section 13.4 summarizes these defaults for cachability. The following Cache-Control response directives allow an origin server to override the default cachability of a response:
public
Indicates that the response is cachable by any cache, even if it would normally be non-cachable or cachable only within a non-shared cache. (See also Authorization, section 14.8, for additional details.)
private
Indicates that all or part of the response message is intended for a single user and MUST NOT be cached by a shared cache. This allows an origin server to state that the specified parts of the response are intended for only one user and are not a valid response for requests by other users. A private (non-shared) cache may cache the response.
Note: This usage of the word private only controls where the response may be cached, and cannot ensure the privacy of the message content.
no-cache
Indicates that all or part of the response message MUST NOT be cached anywhere. This allows an origin server to prevent caching even by caches that have been configured to return stale responses to client requests.
Note: Most HTTP/1.0 caches will not recognize or obey this directive.
14.9.2 What May be Stored by Caches
The purpose of the no-store directive is to prevent the inadvertent release or retention of sensitive information (for example, on backup tapes). The no-store directive applies to the entire message, and may be sent either in a response or in a request. If sent in a request, a cache MUST NOT store any part of either this request or any response to it. If sent in a response, a cache MUST NOT store any part of either this response or the request that elicited it. This directive applies to both non-shared and shared caches. "MUST NOT store" in this context means that the cache MUST NOT intentionally store the information in non-volatile storage, and MUST make a best-effort attempt to remove the information from volatile storage as promptly as possible after forwarding it.
Even when this directive is associated with a response, users may explicitly store such a response outside of the caching system (e.g., with a "Save As" dialog). History buffers may store such responses as part of their normal operation.
The purpose of this directive is to meet the stated requirements of certain users and service authors who are concerned about accidental releases of information via unanticipated accesses to cache data structures. While the use of this directive may improve privacy in some cases, we caution that it is NOT in any way a reliable or sufficient mechanism for ensuring privacy. In particular, malicious or compromised caches may not recognize or obey this directive; and communications networks may be vulnerable to eavesdropping.
14.9.3 Modifications of the Basic Expiration Mechanism
The expiration time of an entity may be specified by the origin server using the Expires header (see section 14.21). Alternatively, it may be specified using the max-age directive in a response.
If a response includes both an Expires header and a max-age directive, the max-age directive overrides the Expires header, even if the Expires header is more restrictive. This rule allows an origin server to provide, for a given response, a longer expiration time to an HTTP/1.1 (or later) cache than to an HTTP/1.0 cache. This may be useful if certain HTTP/1.0 caches improperly calculate ages or expiration times, perhaps due to desynchronized clocks.
Note: most older caches, not compliant with this specification, do not implement any Cache-Control directives. An origin server wishing to use a Cache-Control directive that restricts, but does not prevent, caching by an HTTP/1.1-compliant cache may exploit the requirement that the max-age directive overrides the Expires header, and the fact that non-HTTP/1.1-compliant caches do not observe the max-age directive.
Other directives allow an user agent to modify the basic expiration mechanism. These directives may be specified on a request:
max-age
Indicates that the client is willing to accept a response whose age is no greater than the specified time in seconds. Unless max-stale directive is also included, the client is not willing to accept a stale response.
min-fresh
Indicates that the client is willing to accept a response whose freshness lifetime is no less than its current age plus the
specified time in seconds. That is, the client wants a response that will still be fresh for at least the specified number of seconds.
max-stale
Indicates that the client is willing to accept a response that has exceeded its expiration time. If max-stale is assigned a value, then the client is willing to accept a response that has exceeded its expiration time by no more than the specified number of seconds. If no value is assigned to max-stale, then the client is willing to accept a stale response of any age.
If a cache returns a stale response, either because of a max-stale directive on a request, or because the cache is configured to override the expiration time of a response, the cache MUST attach a Warning header to the stale response, using Warning 10 (Response is stale).
14.9.4 Cache Revalidation and Reload Controls
Sometimes an user agent may want or need to insist that a cache revalidate its cache entry with the origin server (and not just with the next cache along the path to the origin server), or to reload its cache entry from the origin server. End-to-end revalidation may be necessary if either the cache or the origin server has overestimated the expiration time of the cached response. End-to-end reload may be necessary if the cache entry has become corrupted for some reason.
End-to-end revalidation may be requested either when the client does not have its own local cached copy, in which case we call it "unspecified end-to-end revalidation", or when the client does have a local cached copy, in which case we call it "specific end-to-end revalidation."
The client can specify these three kinds of action using Cache- Control request directives:
End-to-end reload
The request includes a "no-cache" Cache-Control directive or, for compatibility with HTTP/1.0 clients, "Pragma: no-cache". No field names may be included with the no-cache directive in a request. The server MUST NOT use a cached copy when responding to such a request.
Specific end-to-end revalidation
The request includes a "max-age=0" Cache-Control directive, which forces each cache along the path to the origin server to revalidate its own entry, if any, with the next cache or server. The initial
request includes a cache-validating conditional with the client's current validator.
Unspecified end-to-end revalidation
The request includes "max-age=0" Cache-Control directive, which forces each cache along the path to the origin server to revalidate its own entry, if any, with the next cache or server. The initial request does not include a cache-validating conditional; the first cache along the path (if any) that holds a cache entry for this resource includes a cache-validating conditional with its current validator.
When an intermediate cache is forced, by means of a max-age=0 directive, to revalidate its own cache entry, and the client has supplied its own validator in the request, the supplied validator may differ from the validator currently stored with the cache entry. In this case, the cache may use either validator in making its own request without affecting semantic transparency.
However, the choice of validator may affect performance. The best approach is for the intermediate cache to use its own validator when making its request. If the server replies with 304 (Not Modified), then the cache should return its now validated copy to the client with a 200 (OK) response. If the server replies with a new entity and cache validator, however, the intermediate cache should compare the returned validator with the one provided in the client's request, using the strong comparison function. If the client's validator is equal to the origin server's, then the intermediate cache simply returns 304 (Not Modified). Otherwise, it returns the new entity with a 200 (OK) response.
If a request includes the no-cache directive, it should not include min-fresh, max-stale, or max-age.
In some cases, such as times of extremely poor network connectivity, a client may want a cache to return only those responses that it currently has stored, and not to reload or revalidate with the origin server. To do this, the client may include the only-if-cached directive in a request. If it receives this directive, a cache SHOULD either respond using a cached entry that is consistent with the other constraints of the request, or respond with a 504 (Gateway Timeout) status. However, if a group of caches is being operated as a unified system with good internal connectivity, such a request MAY be forwarded within that group of caches.
Because a cache may be configured to ignore a server's specified expiration time, and because a client request may include a max-stale directive (which has a similar effect), the protocol also includes a
mechanism for the origin server to require revalidation of a cache entry on any subsequent use. When the must-revalidate directive is present in a response received by a cache, that cache MUST NOT use the entry after it becomes stale to respond to a subsequent request without first revalidating it with the origin server. (I.e., the cache must do an end-to-end revalidation every time, if, based solely on the origin server's Expires or max-age value, the cached response is stale.)
The must-revalidate directive is necessary to support reliable operation for certain protocol features. In all circumstances an HTTP/1.1 cache MUST obey the must-revalidate directive; in particular, if the cache cannot reach the origin server for any reason, it MUST generate a 504 (Gateway Timeout) response.
Servers should send the must-revalidate directive if and only if failure to revalidate a request on the entity could result in incorrect operation, such as a silently unexecuted financial transaction. Recipients MUST NOT take any automated action that violates this directive, and MUST NOT automatically provide an unvalidated copy of the entity if revalidation fails.
Although this is not recommended, user agents operating under severe connectivity constraints may violate this directive but, if so, MUST explicitly warn the user that an unvalidated response has been provided. The warning MUST be provided on each unvalidated access, and SHOULD require explicit user confirmation.
The proxy-revalidate directive has the same meaning as the must- revalidate directive, except that it does not apply to non-shared user agent caches. It can be used on a response to an authenticated request to permit the user's cache to store and later return the response without needing to revalidate it (since it has already been authenticated once by that user), while still requiring proxies that service many users to revalidate each time (in order to make sure that each user has been authenticated). Note that such authenticated responses also need the public cache control directive in order to allow them to be cached at all.
14.9.5 No-Transform Directive
Implementers of intermediate caches (proxies) have found it useful to convert the media type of certain entity bodies. A proxy might, for example, convert between image formats in order to save cache space or to reduce the amount of traffic on a slow link. HTTP has to date been silent on these transformations.
Serious operational problems have already occurred, however, when these transformations have been applied to entity bodies intended for certain kinds of applications. For example, applications for medical imaging, scientific data analysis and those using end-to-end authentication, all depend on receiving an entity body that is bit for bit identical to the original entity-body.
Therefore, if a response includes the no-transform directive, an intermediate cache or proxy MUST NOT change those headers that are listed in section 13.5.2 as being subject to the no-transform directive. This implies that the cache or proxy must not change any aspect of the entity-body that is specified by these headers.
14.9.6 Cache Control Extensions
The Cache-Control header field can be extended through the use of one or more cache-extension tokens, each with an optional assigned value. Informational extensions (those which do not require a change in cache behavior) may be added without changing the semantics of other directives. Behavioral extensions are designed to work by acting as modifiers to the existing base of cache directives. Both the new directive and the standard directive are supplied, such that applications which do not understand the new directive will default to the behavior specified by the standard directive, and those that understand the new directive will recognize it as modifying the requirements associated with the standard directive. In this way, extensions to the Cache-Control directives can be made without requiring changes to the base protocol.
This extension mechanism depends on a HTTP cache obeying all of the cache-control directives defined for its native HTTP-version, obeying certain extensions, and ignoring all directives that it does not understand.
For example, consider a hypothetical new response directive called "community" which acts as a modifier to the "private" directive. We define this new directive to mean that, in addition to any non-shared cache, any cache which is shared only by members of the community named within its value may cache the response. An origin server wishing to allow the "UCI" community to use an otherwise private response in their shared cache(s) may do so by including
Cache-Control: private, community="UCI"
A cache seeing this header field will act correctly even if the cache does not understand the "community" cache-extension, since it will also see and understand the "private" directive and thus default to the safe behavior.
Unrecognized cache-directives MUST be ignored; it is assumed that any cache-directive likely to be unrecognized by an HTTP/1.1 cache will be combined with standard directives (or the response's default cachability) such that the cache behavior will remain minimally correct even if the cache does not understand the extension(s).
14.10 Connection
The Connection general-header field allows the sender to specify options that are desired for that particular connection and MUST NOT be communicated by proxies over further connections.
The Connection header has the following grammar:
Connection-header = "Connection" ":" 1#(connection-token)
connection-token = token
HTTP/1.1 proxies MUST parse the Connection header field before a message is forwarded and, for each connection-token in this field, remove any header field(s) from the message with the same name as the connection-token. Connection options are signaled by the presence of a connection-token in the Connection header field, not by any corresponding additional header field(s), since the additional header field may not be sent if there are no parameters associated with that connection option. HTTP/1.1 defines the "close" connection option for the sender to signal that the connection will be closed after completion of the response. For example,
Connection: close
in either the request or the response header fields indicates that the connection should not be considered `persistent' (section 8.1) after the current request/response is complete.
HTTP/1.1 applications that do not support persistent connections MUST include the "close" connection option in every message.
14.11 Content-Base
The Content-Base entity-header field may be used to specify the base URI for resolving relative URLs within the entity. This header field is described as Base in RFC 1808, which is expected to be revised.
Content-Base = "Content-Base" ":" absoluteURI
If no Content-Base field is present, the base URI of an entity is defined either by its Content-Location (if that Content-Location URI is an absolute URI) or the URI used to initiate the request, in that
order of precedence. Note, however, that the base URI of the contents within the entity-body may be redefined within that entity-body.
14.12 Content-Encoding
The Content-Encoding entity-header field is used as a modifier to the media-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content codings have been applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms MUST be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field. Content-Encoding is primarily used to allow a document to be compressed without losing the identity of its underlying media type.
Content-Encoding = "Content-Encoding" ":" 1#content-coding
Content codings are defined in section 3.5. An example of its use is
Content-Encoding: gzip
The Content-Encoding is a characteristic of the entity identified by the Request-URI. Typically, the entity-body is stored with this encoding and is only decoded before rendering or analogous usage.
If multiple encodings have been applied to an entity, the content codings MUST be listed in the order in which they were applied.
Additional information about the encoding parameters MAY be provided by other entity-header fields not defined by this specification.
14.13 Content-Language
The Content-Language entity-header field describes the natural language(s) of the intended audience for the enclosed entity. Note that this may not be equivalent to all the languages used within the entity-body.
Content-Language = "Content-Language" ":" 1#language-tag
Language tags are defined in section 3.10. The primary purpose of Content-Language is to allow a user to identify and differentiate entities according to the user's own preferred language. Thus, if the body content is intended only for a Danish-literate audience, the appropriate field is
Content-Language: da
If no Content-Language is specified, the default is that the content is intended for all language audiences. This may mean that the sender
does not consider it to be specific to any natural language, or that the sender does not know for which language it is intended.
Multiple languages MAY be listed for content that is intended for multiple audiences. For example, a rendition of the "Treaty of Waitangi," presented simultaneously in the original Maori and English versions, would call for
Content-Language: mi, en
However, just because multiple languages are present within an entity does not mean that it is intended for multiple linguistic audiences. An example would be a beginner's language primer, such as "A First Lesson in Latin," which is clearly intended to be used by an English-literate audience. In this case, the Content-Language should only include "en".
Content-Language may be applied to any media type -- it is not limited to textual documents.
14.14 Content-Length
The Content-Length entity-header field indicates the size of the message-body, in decimal number of octets, sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the size of the entity-body that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
Content-Length = "Content-Length" ":" 1*DIGIT
An example is
Content-Length: 3495
Applications SHOULD use this field to indicate the size of the message-body to be transferred, regardless of the media type of the entity. It must be possible for the recipient to reliably determine the end of HTTP/1.1 requests containing an entity-body, e.g., because the request has a valid Content-Length field, uses Transfer-Encoding: chunked or a multipart body.
Any Content-Length greater than or equal to zero is a valid value. Section 4.4 describes how to determine the length of a message-body if a Content-Length is not given.
Note: The meaning of this field is significantly different from the corresponding definition in MIME, where it is an optional field used within the "message/external-body" content-type. In HTTP, it SHOULD be sent whenever the message's length can be determined prior to being transferred.
14.15 Content-Location
The Content-Location entity-header field may be used to supply the resource location for the entity enclosed in the message. In the case where a resource has multiple entities associated with it, and those entities actually have separate locations by which they might be individually accessed, the server should provide a Content-Location for the particular variant which is returned. In addition, a server SHOULD provide a Content-Location for the resource corresponding to the response entity.
Content-Location = "Content-Location" ":"
( absoluteURI | relativeURI )
If no Content-Base header field is present, the value of Content- Location also defines the base URL for the entity (see section 14.11).
The Content-Location value is not a replacement for the original requested URI; it is only a statement of the location of the resource corresponding to this particular entity at the time of the request. Future requests MAY use the Content-Location URI if the desire is to identify the source of that particular entity.
A cache cannot assume that an entity with a Content-Location different from the URI used to retrieve it can be used to respond to later requests on that Content-Location URI. However, the Content- Location can be used to differentiate between multiple entities retrieved from a single requested resource, as described in section 13.6.
If the Content-Location is a relative URI, the URI is interpreted relative to any Content-Base URI provided in the response. If no Content-Base is provided, the relative URI is interpreted relative to the Request-URI.
14.16 Content-MD5
The Content-MD5 entity-header field, as defined in RFC 1864 [23], is an MD5 digest of the entity-body for the purpose of providing an end-to-end message integrity check (MIC) of the entity-body. (Note: a MIC is good for detecting accidental modification of the entity-body in transit, but is not proof against malicious attacks.)
Content-MD5 = "Content-MD5" ":" md5-digest
md5-digest = <base64 of 128 bit MD5 digest as per RFC 1864>
The Content-MD5 header field may be generated by an origin server to function as an integrity check of the entity-body. Only origin servers may generate the Content-MD5 header field; proxies and gateways MUST NOT generate it, as this would defeat its value as an end-to-end integrity check. Any recipient of the entity-body, including gateways and proxies, MAY check that the digest value in this header field matches that of the entity-body as received.
The MD5 digest is computed based on the content of the entity-body, including any Content-Encoding that has been applied, but not including any Transfer-Encoding that may have been applied to the message-body. If the message is received with a Transfer-Encoding, that encoding must be removed prior to checking the Content-MD5 value against the received entity.
This has the result that the digest is computed on the octets of the entity-body exactly as, and in the order that, they would be sent if no Transfer-Encoding were being applied.
HTTP extends RFC 1864 to permit the digest to be computed for MIME composite media-types (e.g., multipart/* and message/rfc822), but this does not change how the digest is computed as defined in the preceding paragraph.
Note: There are several consequences of this. The entity-body for composite types may contain many body-parts, each with its own MIME and HTTP headers (including Content-MD5, Content-Transfer-Encoding, and Content-Encoding headers). If a body-part has a Content- Transfer-Encoding or Content-Encoding header, it is assumed that the content of the body-part has had the encoding applied, and the body-part is included in the Content-MD5 digest as is -- i.e., after the application. The Transfer-Encoding header field is not allowed within body-parts.
Note: while the definition of Content-MD5 is exactly the same for HTTP as in RFC 1864 for MIME entity-bodies, there are several ways
in which the application of Content-MD5 to HTTP entity-bodies differs from its application to MIME entity-bodies. One is that HTTP, unlike MIME, does not use Content-Transfer-Encoding, and does use Transfer-Encoding and Content-Encoding. Another is that HTTP more frequently uses binary content types than MIME, so it is worth noting that, in such cases, the byte order used to compute the digest is the transmission byte order defined for the type. Lastly, HTTP allows transmission of text types with any of several line break conventions and not just the canonical form using CRLF. Conversion of all line breaks to CRLF should not be done before computing or checking the digest: the line break convention used in the text actually transmitted should be left unaltered when computing the digest.
14.17 Content-Range
The Content-Range entity-header is sent with a partial entity-body to specify where in the full entity-body the partial body should be inserted. It also indicates the total size of the full entity-body. When a server returns a partial response to a client, it must describe both the extent of the range covered by the response, and the length of the entire entity-body.
Content-Range = "Content-Range" ":" content-range-spec
content-range-spec = byte-content-range-spec
byte-content-range-spec = bytes-unit SP first-byte-pos "-"
last-byte-pos "/" entity-length
entity-length = 1*DIGIT
Unlike byte-ranges-specifier values, a byte-content-range-spec may only specify one range, and must contain absolute byte positions for both the first and last byte of the range.
A byte-content-range-spec whose last-byte-pos value is less than its first-byte-pos value, or whose entity-length value is less than or equal to its last-byte-pos value, is invalid. The recipient of an invalid byte-content-range-spec MUST ignore it and any content transferred along with it.
Examples of byte-content-range-spec values, assuming that the entity
contains a total of 1234 bytes:
o The first 500 bytes:
bytes 0-499/1234
o The second 500 bytes:
bytes 500-999/1234
o All except for the first 500 bytes:
bytes 500-1233/1234
o The last 500 bytes:
bytes 734-1233/1234
When an HTTP message includes the content of a single range (for example, a response to a request for a single range, or to a request for a set of ranges that overlap without any holes), this content is transmitted with a Content-Range header, and a Content-Length header showing the number of bytes actually transferred. For example,
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial content
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 06:25:24 GMT
Last-modified: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 04:58:08 GMT
Content-Range: bytes 21010-47021/47022
Content-Length: 26012
Content-Type: image/gif
When an HTTP message includes the content of multiple ranges (for example, a response to a request for multiple non-overlapping ranges), these are transmitted as a multipart MIME message. The multipart MIME content-type used for this purpose is defined in this specification to be "multipart/byteranges". See appendix 19.2 for its definition.
A client that cannot decode a MIME multipart/byteranges message should not ask for multiple byte-ranges in a single request.
When a client requests multiple byte-ranges in one request, the server SHOULD return them in the order that they appeared in the request.
If the server ignores a byte-range-spec because it is invalid, the server should treat the request as if the invalid Range header field
did not exist. (Normally, this means return a 200 response containing the full entity). The reason is that the only time a client will make such an invalid request is when the entity is smaller than the entity retrieved by a prior request.
14.18 Content-Type
The Content-Type entity-header field indicates the media type of the entity-body sent to the recipient or, in the case of the HEAD method, the media type that would have been sent had the request been a GET.
Content-Type = "Content-Type" ":" media-type
Media types are defined in section 3.7. An example of the field is
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-4
Further discussion of methods for identifying the media type of an entity is provided in section 7.2.1.
14.19 Date
The Date general-header field represents the date and time at which the message was originated, having the same semantics as orig-date in RFC 822. The field value is an HTTP-date, as described in section 3.3.1.
Date = "Date" ":" HTTP-date
An example is
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 08:12:31 GMT
If a message is received via direct connection with the user agent (in the case of requests) or the origin server (in the case of responses), then the date can be assumed to be the current date at the receiving end. However, since the date--as it is believed by the origin--is important for evaluating cached responses, origin servers MUST include a Date header field in all responses. Clients SHOULD only send a Date header field in messages that include an entity- body, as in the case of the PUT and POST requests, and even then it is optional. A received message which does not have a Date header field SHOULD be assigned one by the recipient if the message will be cached by that recipient or gatewayed via a protocol which requires a Date.
In theory, the date SHOULD represent the moment just before the entity is generated. In practice, the date can be generated at any time during the message origination without affecting its semantic value.
The format of the Date is an absolute date and time as defined by HTTP-date in section 3.3; it MUST be sent in RFC1123 [8]-date format.
14.20 ETag
The ETag entity-header field defines the entity tag for the associated entity. The headers used with entity tags are described in sections 14.20, 14.25, 14.26 and 14.43. The entity tag may be used for comparison with other entities from the same resource (see section 13.3.2).
ETag = "ETag" ":" entity-tag
Examples:
ETag: "xyzzy"
ETag: W/"xyzzy"
ETag: ""
14.21 Expires
The Expires entity-header field gives the date/time after which the response should be considered stale. A stale cache entry may not normally be returned by a cache (either a proxy cache or an user agent cache) unless it is first validated with the origin server (or with an intermediate cache that has a fresh copy of the entity). See section 13.2 for further discussion of the expiration model.
The presence of an Expires field does not imply that the original resource will change or cease to exist at, before, or after that time.
The format is an absolute date and time as defined by HTTP-date in section 3.3; it MUST be in RFC1123-date format:
Expires = "Expires" ":" HTTP-date
An example of its use is
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Note: if a response includes a Cache-Control field with the max-age directive, that directive overrides the Expires field.
HTTP/1.1 clients and caches MUST treat other invalid date formats, especially including the value "0", as in the past (i.e., "already expired").
To mark a response as "already expired," an origin server should use an Expires date that is equal to the Date header value. (See the rules for expiration calculations in section 13.2.4.)
To mark a response as "never expires," an origin server should use an Expires date approximately one year from the time the response is sent. HTTP/1.1 servers should not send Expires dates more than one year in the future.
The presence of an Expires header field with a date value of some time in the future on an response that otherwise would by default be non-cacheable indicates that the response is cachable, unless indicated otherwise by a Cache-Control header field (section 14.9).
14.22 From
The From request-header field, if given, SHOULD contain an Internet e-mail address for the human user who controls the requesting user agent. The address SHOULD be machine-usable, as defined by mailbox in RFC 822 (as updated by RFC 1123 ):
From = "From" ":" mailbox
An example is:
From: [email protected]
This header field MAY be used for logging purposes and as a means for identifying the source of invalid or unwanted requests. It SHOULD NOT be used as an insecure form of access protection. The interpretation of this field is that the request is being performed on behalf of the person given, who accepts responsibility for the method performed. In particular, robot agents SHOULD include this header so that the person responsible for running the robot can be contacted if problems occur on the receiving end.
The Internet e-mail address in this field MAY be separate from the Internet host which issued the request. For example, when a request is passed through a proxy the original issuer's address SHOULD be used.
Note: The client SHOULD not send the From header field without the user's approval, as it may conflict with the user's privacy interests or their site's security policy. It is strongly recommended that the user be able to disable, enable, and modify the value of this field at any time prior to a request.
14.23 Host
The Host request-header field specifies the Internet host and port number of the resource being requested, as obtained from the original URL given by the user or referring resource (generally an HTTP URL, as described in section 3.2.2). The Host field value MUST represent the network location of the origin server or gateway given by the original URL. This allows the origin server or gateway to differentiate between internally-ambiguous URLs, such as the root "/" URL of a server for multiple host names on a single IP address.
Host = "Host" ":" host [ ":" port ] ; Section 3.2.2
A "host" without any trailing port information implies the default port for the service requested (e.g., "80" for an HTTP URL). For example, a request on the origin server for <http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/> MUST include:
GET /pub/WWW/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.w3.org
A client MUST include a Host header field in all HTTP/1.1 request messages on the Internet (i.e., on any message corresponding to a request for a URL which includes an Internet host address for the service being requested). If the Host field is not already present, an HTTP/1.1 proxy MUST add a Host field to the request message prior to forwarding it on the Internet. All Internet-based HTTP/1.1 servers MUST respond with a 400 status code to any HTTP/1.1 request message which lacks a Host header field.
See sections 5.2 and 19.5.1 for other requirements relating to Host.
14.24 If-Modified-Since
The If-Modified-Since request-header field is used with the GET method to make it conditional: if the requested variant has not been modified since the time specified in this field, an entity will not
be returned from the server; instead, a 304 (not modified) response will be returned without any message-body.
If-Modified-Since = "If-Modified-Since" ":" HTTP-date
An example of the field is:
If-Modified-Since: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 19:43:31 GMT
A GET method with an If-Modified-Since header and no Range header requests that the identified entity be transferred only if it has been modified since the date given by the If-Modified-Since header. The algorithm for determining this includes the following cases:
a)If the request would normally result in anything other than a 200
(OK) status, or if the passed If-Modified-Since date is invalid, the response is exactly the same as for a normal GET. A date which is later than the server's current time is invalid.
b)If the variant has been modified since the If-Modified-Since date,
the response is exactly the same as for a normal GET.
c)If the variant has not been modified since a valid If-Modified-Since
date, the server MUST return a 304 (Not Modified) response.
The purpose of this feature is to allow efficient updates of cached information with a minimum amount of transaction overhead.
Note that the Range request-header field modifies the meaning of If-Modified-Since; see section 14.36 for full details.
Note that If-Modified-Since times are interpreted by the server, whose clock may not be synchronized with the client.
Note that if a client uses an arbitrary date in the If-Modified-Since header instead of a date taken from the Last-Modified header for the same request, the client should be aware of the fact that this date is interpreted in the server's understanding of time. The client should consider unsynchronized clocks and rounding problems due to the different encodings of time between the client and server. This includes the possibility of race conditions if the document has changed between the time it was first requested and the If-Modified- Since date of a subsequent request, and the possibility of clock- skew-related problems if the If-Modified-Since date is derived from the client's clock without correction to the server's clock. Corrections for different time bases between client and server are at best approximate due to network latency.
14.25 If-Match
The If-Match request-header field is used with a method to make it conditional. A client that has one or more entities previously obtained from the resource can verify that one of those entities is current by including a list of their associated entity tags in the If-Match header field. The purpose of this feature is to allow efficient updates of cached information with a minimum amount of transaction overhead. It is also used, on updating requests, to prevent inadvertent modification of the wrong version of a resource. As a special case, the value "*" matches any current entity of the resource.
If-Match = "If-Match" ":" ( "*" | 1#entity-tag )
If any of the entity tags match the entity tag of the entity that would have been returned in the response to a similar GET request (without the If-Match header) on that resource, or if "*" is given and any current entity exists for that resource, then the server MAY perform the requested method as if the If-Match header field did not exist.
A server MUST use the strong comparison function (see section 3.11) to compare the entity tags in If-Match.
If none of the entity tags match, or if "*" is given and no current entity exists, the server MUST NOT perform the requested method, and MUST return a 412 (Precondition Failed) response. This behavior is most useful when the client wants to prevent an updating method, such as PUT, from modifying a resource that has changed since the client last retrieved it.
If the request would, without the If-Match header field, result in anything other than a 2xx status, then the If-Match header MUST be ignored.
The meaning of "If-Match: *" is that the method SHOULD be performed if the representation selected by the origin server (or by a cache, possibly using the Vary mechanism, see section 14.43) exists, and MUST NOT be performed if the representation does not exist.
A request intended to update a resource (e.g., a PUT) MAY include an If-Match header field to signal that the request method MUST NOT be applied if the entity corresponding to the If-Match value (a single entity tag) is no longer a representation of that resource. This allows the user to indicate that they do not wish the request to be successful if the resource has been changed without their knowledge. Examples:
If-Match: "xyzzy"
If-Match: "xyzzy", "r2d2xxxx", "c3piozzzz"
If-Match: *
14.26 If-None-Match
The If-None-Match request-header field is used with a method to make it conditional. A client that has one or more entities previously obtained from the resource can verify that none of those entities is current by including a list of their associated entity tags in the If-None-Match header field. The purpose of this feature is to allow efficient updates of cached information with a minimum amount of transaction overhead. It is also used, on updating requests, to prevent inadvertent modification of a resource which was not known to exist.
As a special case, the value "*" matches any current entity of the resource.
If-None-Match = "If-None-Match" ":" ( "*" | 1#entity-tag )
If any of the entity tags match the entity tag of the entity that would have been returned in the response to a similar GET request (without the If-None-Match header) on that resource, or if "*" is given and any current entity exists for that resource, then the server MUST NOT perform the requested method. Instead, if the request method was GET or HEAD, the server SHOULD respond with a 304 (Not Modified) response, including the cache-related entity-header fields (particularly ETag) of one of the entities that matched. For all other request methods, the server MUST respond with a status of 412 (Precondition Failed).
See section 13.3.3 for rules on how to determine if two entity tags match. The weak comparison function can only be used with GET or HEAD requests.
If none of the entity tags match, or if "*" is given and no current entity exists, then the server MAY perform the requested method as if the If-None-Match header field did not exist.
If the request would, without the If-None-Match header field, result
in anything other than a 2xx status, then the If-None-Match header
MUST be ignored.
The meaning of "If-None-Match: *" is that the method MUST NOT be performed if the representation selected by the origin server (or by a cache, possibly using the Vary mechanism, see section 14.43) exists, and SHOULD be performed if the representation does not exist. This feature may be useful in preventing races between PUT operations.
Examples:
If-None-Match: "xyzzy"
If-None-Match: W/"xyzzy"
If-None-Match: "xyzzy", "r2d2xxxx", "c3piozzzz"
If-None-Match: W/"xyzzy", W/"r2d2xxxx", W/"c3piozzzz"
If-None-Match: *
14.27 If-Range
If a client has a partial copy of an entity in its cache, and wishes to have an up-to-date copy of the entire entity in its cache, it could use the Range request-header with a conditional GET (using either or both of If-Unmodified-Since and If-Match.) However, if the condition fails because the entity has been modified, the client would then have to make a second request to obtain the entire current entity-body.
The If-Range header allows a client to "short-circuit" the second request. Informally, its meaning is `if the entity is unchanged, send me the part(s) that I am missing; otherwise, send me the entire new entity.'
If-Range = "If-Range" ":" ( entity-tag | HTTP-date )
If the client has no entity tag for an entity, but does have a Last- Modified date, it may use that date in a If-Range header. (The server can distinguish between a valid HTTP-date and any form of entity-tag by examining no more than two characters.) The If-Range header should only be used together with a Range header, and must be ignored if the request does not include a Range header, or if the server does not support the sub-range operation.
If the entity tag given in the If-Range header matches the current
entity tag for the entity, then the server should provide the
specified sub-range of the entity using a 206 (Partial content)
response. If the entity tag does not match, then the server should
return the entire entity using a 200 (OK) response.
14.28 If-Unmodified-Since
The If-Unmodified-Since request-header field is used with a method to make it conditional. If the requested resource has not been modified since the time specified in this field, the server should perform the requested operation as if the If-Unmodified-Since header were not present.
If the requested variant has been modified since the specified time, the server MUST NOT perform the requested operation, and MUST return a 412 (Precondition Failed).
If-Unmodified-Since = "If-Unmodified-Since" ":" HTTP-date
An example of the field is:
If-Unmodified-Since: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 19:43:31 GMT
If the request normally (i.e., without the If-Unmodified-Since header) would result in anything other than a 2xx status, the If- Unmodified-Since header should be ignored.
If the specified date is invalid, the header is ignored.
14.29 Last-Modified
The Last-Modified entity-header field indicates the date and time at which the origin server believes the variant was last modified.
Last-Modified = "Last-Modified" ":" HTTP-date
An example of its use is
Last-Modified: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 12:45:26 GMT
The exact meaning of this header field depends on the implementation of the origin server and the nature of the original resource. For files, it may be just the file system last-modified time. For entities with dynamically included parts, it may be the most recent of the set of last-modify times for its component parts. For database gateways, it may be the last-update time stamp of the record. For virtual objects, it may be the last time the internal state changed.
An origin server MUST NOT send a Last-Modified date which is later than the server's time of message origination. In such cases, where the resource's last modification would indicate some time in the future, the server MUST replace that date with the message origination date.
An origin server should obtain the Last-Modified value of the entity as close as possible to the time that it generates the Date value of its response. This allows a recipient to make an accurate assessment of the entity's modification time, especially if the entity changes near the time that the response is generated.
HTTP/1.1 servers SHOULD send Last-Modified whenever feasible.
14.30 Location
The Location response-header field is used to redirect the recipient to a location other than the Request-URI for completion of the request or identification of a new resource. For 201 (Created) responses, the Location is that of the new resource which was created by the request. For 3xx responses, the location SHOULD indicate the server's preferred URL for automatic redirection to the resource. The field value consists of a single absolute URL.
Location = "Location" ":" absoluteURI
An example is
Location: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People.html
Note: The Content-Location header field (section 14.15) differs from Location in that the Content-Location identifies the original location of the entity enclosed in the request. It is therefore possible for a response to contain header fields for both Location and Content-Location. Also see section 13.10 for cache requirements of some methods.
14.31 Max-Forwards
The Max-Forwards request-header field may be used with the TRACE method (section 14.31) to limit the number of proxies or gateways that can forward the request to the next inbound server. This can be useful when the client is attempting to trace a request chain which appears to be failing or looping in mid-chain.
Max-Forwards = "Max-Forwards" ":" 1*DIGIT
The Max-Forwards value is a decimal integer indicating the remaining number of times this request message may be forwarded.
Each proxy or gateway recipient of a TRACE request containing a Max- Forwards header field SHOULD check and update its value prior to forwarding the request. If the received value is zero (0), the recipient SHOULD NOT forward the request; instead, it SHOULD respond as the final recipient with a 200 (OK) response containing the received request message as the response entity-body (as described in section 9.8). If the received Max-Forwards value is greater than zero, then the forwarded message SHOULD contain an updated Max- Forwards field with a value decremented by one (1).
The Max-Forwards header field SHOULD be ignored for all other methods defined by this specification and for any extension methods for which it is not explicitly referred to as part of that method definition.
14.32 Pragma
The Pragma general-header field is used to include implementation- specific directives that may apply to any recipient along the request/response chain. All pragma directives specify optional behavior from the viewpoint of the protocol; however, some systems MAY require that behavior be consistent with the directives.
Pragma = "Pragma" ":" 1#pragma-directive
pragma-directive = "no-cache" | extension-pragma
extension-pragma = token [ "=" ( token | quoted-string ) ]
When the no-cache directive is present in a request message, an application SHOULD forward the request toward the origin server even if it has a cached copy of what is being requested. This pragma directive has the same semantics as the no-cache cache-directive (see section 14.9) and is defined here for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0. Clients SHOULD include both header fields when a no-cache request is sent to a server not known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant.
Pragma directives MUST be passed through by a proxy or gateway application, regardless of their significance to that application, since the directives may be applicable to all recipients along the request/response chain. It is not possible to specify a pragma for a specific recipient; however, any pragma directive not relevant to a recipient SHOULD be ignored by that recipient.
HTTP/1.1 clients SHOULD NOT send the Pragma request-header. HTTP/1.1 caches SHOULD treat "Pragma: no-cache" as if the client had sent "Cache-Control: no-cache". No new Pragma directives will be defined in HTTP.
14.33 Proxy-Authenticate
The Proxy-Authenticate response-header field MUST be included as part of a 407 (Proxy Authentication Required) response. The field value consists of a challenge that indicates the authentication scheme and parameters applicable to the proxy for this Request-URI.
Proxy-Authenticate = "Proxy-Authenticate" ":" challenge
The HTTP access authentication process is described in section 11. Unlike WWW-Authenticate, the Proxy-Authenticate header field applies only to the current connection and SHOULD NOT be passed on to downstream clients. However, an intermediate proxy may need to obtain its own credentials by requesting them from the downstream client, which in some circumstances will appear as if the proxy is forwarding the Proxy-Authenticate header field.
14.34 Proxy-Authorization
The Proxy-Authorization request-header field allows the client to identify itself (or its user) to a proxy which requires authentication. The Proxy-Authorization field value consists of credentials containing the authentication information of the user agent for the proxy and/or realm of the resource being requested.
Proxy-Authorization = "Proxy-Authorization" ":" credentials
The HTTP access authentication process is described in section 11. Unlike Authorization, the Proxy-Authorization header field applies only to the next outbound proxy that demanded authentication using the Proxy-Authenticate field. When multiple proxies are used in a chain, the Proxy-Authorization header field is consumed by the first outbound proxy that was expecting to receive credentials. A proxy MAY relay the credentials from the client request to the next proxy if that is the mechanism by which the proxies cooperatively authenticate a given request.
14.35 Public
The Public response-header field lists the set of methods supported by the server. The purpose of this field is strictly to inform the recipient of the capabilities of the server regarding unusual methods. The methods listed may or may not be applicable to the
Request-URI; the Allow header field (section 14.7) MAY be used to indicate methods allowed for a particular URI.
Public = "Public" ":" 1#method
Example of use:
Public: OPTIONS, MGET, MHEAD, GET, HEAD
This header field applies only to the server directly connected to the client (i.e., the nearest neighbor in a chain of connections). If the response passes through a proxy, the proxy MUST either remove the Public header field or replace it with one applicable to its own capabilities.
14.36 Range
14.36.1 Byte Ranges
Since all HTTP entities are represented in HTTP messages as sequences of bytes, the concept of a byte range is meaningful for any HTTP entity. (However, not all clients and servers need to support byte- range operations.)
Byte range specifications in HTTP apply to the sequence of bytes in the entity-body (not necessarily the same as the message-body).
A byte range operation may specify a single range of bytes, or a set of ranges within a single entity.
ranges-specifier = byte-ranges-specifier
byte-ranges-specifier = bytes-unit "=" byte-range-set
byte-range-set = 1#( byte-range-spec | suffix-byte-range-spec )
byte-range-spec = first-byte-pos "-" [last-byte-pos]
first-byte-pos = 1*DIGIT
last-byte-pos = 1*DIGIT
The first-byte-pos value in a byte-range-spec gives the byte-offset of the first byte in a range. The last-byte-pos value gives the byte-offset of the last byte in the range; that is, the byte positions specified are inclusive. Byte offsets start at zero.
If the last-byte-pos value is present, it must be greater than or equal to the first-byte-pos in that byte-range-spec, or the byte- range-spec is invalid. The recipient of an invalid byte-range-spec must ignore it.
If the last-byte-pos value is absent, or if the value is greater than or equal to the current length of the entity-body, last-byte-pos is taken to be equal to one less than the current length of the entity- body in bytes.
By its choice of last-byte-pos, a client can limit the number of bytes retrieved without knowing the size of the entity.
suffix-byte-range-spec = "-" suffix-length
suffix-length = 1*DIGIT
A suffix-byte-range-spec is used to specify the suffix of the entity-body, of a length given by the suffix-length value. (That is, this form specifies the last N bytes of an entity-body.) If the entity is shorter than the specified suffix-length, the entire entity-body is used.
Examples of byte-ranges-specifier values (assuming an entity-body of length 10000):
o The first 500 bytes (byte offsets 0-499, inclusive):
bytes=0-499
o The second 500 bytes (byte offsets 500-999, inclusive):
bytes=500-999
o The final 500 bytes (byte offsets 9500-9999, inclusive):
bytes=-500
o Or
bytes=9500-
o The first and last bytes only (bytes 0 and 9999):
bytes=0-0,-1
o Several legal but not canonical specifications of the second
500 bytes (byte offsets 500-999, inclusive):
bytes=500-600,601-999
bytes=500-700,601-999
14.36.2 Range Retrieval Requests
HTTP retrieval requests using conditional or unconditional GET methods may request one or more sub-ranges of the entity, instead of the entire entity, using the Range request header, which applies to the entity returned as the result of the request:
Range = "Range" ":" ranges-specifier
A server MAY ignore the Range header. However, HTTP/1.1 origin servers and intermediate caches SHOULD support byte ranges when possible, since Range supports efficient recovery from partially failed transfers, and supports efficient partial retrieval of large entities.
If the server supports the Range header and the specified range or ranges are appropriate for the entity:
o The presence of a Range header in an unconditional GET modifies
what is returned if the GET is otherwise successful. In other
words, the response carries a status code of 206 (Partial
Content) instead of 200 (OK).
o The presence of a Range header in a conditional GET (a request
using one or both of If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match, or
one or both of If-Unmodified-Since and If-Match) modifies what
is returned if the GET is otherwise successful and the condition
is true. It does not affect the 304 (Not Modified) response
returned if the conditional is false.
In some cases, it may be more appropriate to use the If-Range header (see section 14.27) in addition to the Range header.
If a proxy that supports ranges receives a Range request, forwards the request to an inbound server, and receives an entire entity in reply, it SHOULD only return the requested range to its client. It SHOULD store the entire received response in its cache, if that is consistent with its cache allocation policies.
14.37 Referer
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.
Referer = "Referer" ":" ( absoluteURI | relativeURI )
Example:
Referer: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/Overview.html
If the field value is a partial URI, it SHOULD be interpreted relative to the Request-URI. The URI MUST NOT include a fragment.
Note: Because the source of a link may be private information or may reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From information.
14.38 Retry-After
The Retry-After response-header field can be used with a 503 (Service Unavailable) response to indicate how long the service is expected to be unavailable to the requesting client. The value of this field can be either an HTTP-date or an integer number of seconds (in decimal) after the time of the response.
Retry-After = "Retry-After" ":" ( HTTP-date | delta-seconds )
Two examples of its use are
Retry-After: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT
Retry-After: 120
In the latter example, the delay is 2 minutes.
14.39 Server
The Server response-header field contains information about the software used by the origin server to handle the request. The field can contain multiple product tokens (section 3.8) and comments identifying the server and any significant subproducts. The product tokens are listed in order of their significance for identifying the application.
Server = "Server" ":" 1*( product | comment )
Example:
Server: CERN/3.0 libwww/2.17
If the response is being forwarded through a proxy, the proxy application MUST NOT modify the Server response-header. Instead, it SHOULD include a Via field (as described in section 14.44).
Note: Revealing the specific software version of the server may allow the server machine to become more vulnerable to attacks against software that is known to contain security holes. Server implementers are encouraged to make this field a configurable option.
14.40 Transfer-Encoding
The Transfer-Encoding general-header field indicates what (if any) type of transformation has been applied to the message body in order to safely transfer it between the sender and the recipient. This differs from the Content-Encoding in that the transfer coding is a property of the message, not of the entity.
Transfer-Encoding = "Transfer-Encoding" ":" 1#transfer-
coding
Transfer codings are defined in section 3.6. An example is:
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Many older HTTP/1.0 applications do not understand the Transfer- Encoding header.
14.41 Upgrade
The Upgrade general-header allows the client to specify what additional communication protocols it supports and would like to use if the server finds it appropriate to switch protocols. The server
MUST use the Upgrade header field within a 101 (Switching Protocols) response to indicate which protocol(s) are being switched.
Upgrade = "Upgrade" ":" 1#product
For example,
Upgrade: HTTP/2.0, SHTTP/1.3, IRC/6.9, RTA/x11
The Upgrade header field is intended to provide a simple mechanism for transition from HTTP/1.1 to some other, incompatible protocol. It does so by allowing the client to advertise its desire to use another protocol, such as a later version of HTTP with a higher major version number, even though the current request has been made using HTTP/1.1. This eases the difficult transition between incompatible protocols by allowing the client to initiate a request in the more commonly supported protocol while indicating to the server that it would like to use a "better" protocol if available (where "better" is determined by the server, possibly according to the nature of the method and/or resource being requested).
The Upgrade header field only applies to switching application-layer protocols upon the existing transport-layer connection. Upgrade cannot be used to insist on a protocol change; its acceptance and use by the server is optional. The capabilities and nature of the application-layer communication after the protocol change is entirely dependent upon the new protocol chosen, although the first action after changing the protocol MUST be a response to the initial HTTP request containing the Upgrade header field.
The Upgrade header field only applies to the immediate connection. Therefore, the upgrade keyword MUST be supplied within a Connection header field (section 14.10) whenever Upgrade is present in an HTTP/1.1 message.
The Upgrade header field cannot be used to indicate a switch to a protocol on a different connection. For that purpose, it is more appropriate to use a 301, 302, 303, or 305 redirection response.
This specification only defines the protocol name "HTTP" for use by the family of Hypertext Transfer Protocols, as defined by the HTTP version rules of section 3.1 and future updates to this specification. Any token can be used as a protocol name; however, it will only be useful if both the client and server associate the name with the same protocol.
14.42 User-Agent
The User-Agent request-header field contains information about the user agent originating the request. This is for statistical purposes, the tracing of protocol violations, and automated recognition of user agents for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations. User agents SHOULD include this field with requests. The field can contain multiple product tokens (section 3.8) and comments identifying the agent and any subproducts which form a significant part of the user agent. By convention, the product tokens are listed in order of their significance for identifying the application.
User-Agent = "User-Agent" ":" 1*( product | comment )
Example:
User-Agent: CERN-LineMode/2.15 libwww/2.17b3
14.43 Vary
The Vary response-header field is used by a server to signal that the response entity was selected from the available representations of the response using server-driven negotiation (section 12). Field- names listed in Vary headers are those of request-headers. The Vary field value indicates either that the given set of header fields encompass the dimensions over which the representation might vary, or that the dimensions of variance are unspecified ("*") and thus may vary over any aspect of future requests.
Vary = "Vary" ":" ( "*" | 1#field-name )
An HTTP/1.1 server MUST include an appropriate Vary header field with any cachable response that is subject to server-driven negotiation. Doing so allows a cache to properly interpret future requests on that resource and informs the user agent about the presence of negotiation on that resource. A server SHOULD include an appropriate Vary header field with a non-cachable response that is subject to server-driven negotiation, since this might provide the user agent with useful information about the dimensions over which the response might vary.
The set of header fields named by the Vary field value is known as the "selecting" request-headers.
When the cache receives a subsequent request whose Request-URI specifies one or more cache entries including a Vary header, the cache MUST NOT use such a cache entry to construct a response to the new request unless all of the headers named in the cached Vary header
are present in the new request, and all of the stored selecting request-headers from the previous request match the corresponding headers in the new request.
The selecting request-headers from two requests are defined to match if and only if the selecting request-headers in the first request can be transformed to the selecting request-headers in the second request by adding or removing linear whitespace (LWS) at places where this is allowed by the corresponding BNF, and/or combining multiple message- header fields with the same field name following the rules about message headers in section 4.2.
A Vary field value of "*" signals that unspecified parameters, possibly other than the contents of request-header fields (e.g., the network address of the client), play a role in the selection of the response representation. Subsequent requests on that resource can only be properly interpreted by the origin server, and thus a cache MUST forward a (possibly conditional) request even when it has a fresh response cached for the resource. See section 13.6 for use of the Vary header by caches.
A Vary field value consisting of a list of field-names signals that the representation selected for the response is based on a selection algorithm which considers ONLY the listed request-header field values in selecting the most appropriate representation. A cache MAY assume that the same selection will be made for future requests with the same values for the listed field names, for the duration of time in which the response is fresh.
The field-names given are not limited to the set of standard request-header fields defined by this specification. Field names are case-insensitive.
14.44 Via
The Via general-header field MUST be used by gateways and proxies to indicate the intermediate protocols and recipients between the user agent and the server on requests, and between the origin server and the client on responses. It is analogous to the "Received" field of RFC 822 and is intended to be used for tracking message forwards, avoiding request loops, and identifying the protocol capabilities of all senders along the request/response chain.
Via = "Via" ":" 1#( received-protocol received-by [ comment ] )
received-protocol = [ protocol-name "/" ] protocol-version protocol-name = token protocol-version = token received-by = ( host [ ":" port ] ) | pseudonym pseudonym = token
The received-protocol indicates the protocol version of the message received by the server or client along each segment of the request/response chain. The received-protocol version is appended to the Via field value when the message is forwarded so that information about the protocol capabilities of upstream applications remains visible to all recipients.
The protocol-name is optional if and only if it would be "HTTP". The received-by field is normally the host and optional port number of a recipient server or client that subsequently forwarded the message. However, if the real host is considered to be sensitive information, it MAY be replaced by a pseudonym. If the port is not given, it MAY be assumed to be the default port of the received-protocol.
Multiple Via field values represent each proxy or gateway that has forwarded the message. Each recipient MUST append its information such that the end result is ordered according to the sequence of forwarding applications.
Comments MAY be used in the Via header field to identify the software of the recipient proxy or gateway, analogous to the User-Agent and Server header fields. However, all comments in the Via field are optional and MAY be removed by any recipient prior to forwarding the message.
For example, a request message could be sent from an HTTP/1.0 user agent to an internal proxy code-named "fred", which uses HTTP/1.1 to forward the request to a public proxy at nowhere.com, which completes the request by forwarding it to the origin server at www.ics.uci.edu. The request received by www.ics.uci.edu would then have the following Via header field:
Via: 1.0 fred, 1.1 nowhere.com (Apache/1.1)
Proxies and gateways used as a portal through a network firewall SHOULD NOT, by default, forward the names and ports of hosts within the firewall region. This information SHOULD only be propagated if explicitly enabled. If not enabled, the received-by host of any host behind the firewall SHOULD be replaced by an appropriate pseudonym for that host.
For organizations that have strong privacy requirements for hiding internal structures, a proxy MAY combine an ordered subsequence of Via header field entries with identical received-protocol values into a single such entry. For example,
Via: 1.0 ricky, 1.1 ethel, 1.1 fred, 1.0 lucy
could be collapsed to
Via: 1.0 ricky, 1.1 mertz, 1.0 lucy
Applications SHOULD NOT combine multiple entries unless they are all under the same organizational control and the hosts have already been replaced by pseudonyms. Applications MUST NOT combine entries which have different received-protocol values.
14.45 Warning
The Warning response-header field is used to carry additional information about the status of a response which may not be reflected by the response status code. This information is typically, though not exclusively, used to warn about a possible lack of semantic transparency from caching operations.
Warning headers are sent with responses using:
Warning = "Warning" ":" 1#warning-value
warning-value = warn-code SP warn-agent SP warn-text
warn-code = 2DIGIT
warn-agent = ( host [ ":" port ] ) | pseudonym
; the name or pseudonym of the server adding
; the Warning header, for use in debugging
warn-text = quoted-string
A response may carry more than one Warning header.
The warn-text should be in a natural language and character set that is most likely to be intelligible to the human user receiving the response. This decision may be based on any available knowledge, such as the location of the cache or user, the Accept-Language field in a request, the Content-Language field in a response, etc. The default language is English and the default character set is ISO- 8859-1.
If a character set other than ISO-8859-1 is used, it MUST be encoded in the warn-text using the method described in RFC 1522 [14].
Any server or cache may add Warning headers to a response. New
Warning headers should be added after any existing Warning headers. A
cache MUST NOT delete any Warning header that it received with a
response. However, if a cache successfully validates a cache entry,
it SHOULD remove any Warning headers previously attached to that
entry except as specified for specific Warning codes. It MUST then
add any Warning headers received in the validating response. In other
words, Warning headers are those that would be attached to the most
recent relevant response.
When multiple Warning headers are attached to a response, the user agent SHOULD display as many of them as possible, in the order that they appear in the response. If it is not possible to display all of the warnings, the user agent should follow these heuristics:
o Warnings that appear early in the response take priority over those
appearing later in the response.
o Warnings in the user's preferred character set take priority over
warnings in other character sets but with identical warn-codes and
warn-agents.
Systems that generate multiple Warning headers should order them with this user agent behavior in mind.
This is a list of the currently-defined warn-codes, each with a recommended warn-text in English, and a description of its meaning.
10 Response is stale
MUST be included whenever the returned response is stale. A cache may add this warning to any response, but may never remove it until the response is known to be fresh.
11 Revalidation failed
MUST be included if a cache returns a stale response because an attempt to revalidate the response failed, due to an inability to reach the server. A cache may add this warning to any response, but may never remove it until the response is successfully revalidated.
12 Disconnected operation SHOULD be included if the cache is intentionally disconnected from
the rest of the network for a period of time.
13 Heuristic expiration
MUST be included if the cache heuristically chose a freshness lifetime greater than 24 hours and the response's age is greater than 24 hours.
14 Transformation applied
MUST be added by an intermediate cache or proxy if it applies any transformation changing the content-coding (as specified in the Content-Encoding header) or media-type (as specified in the Content-Type header) of the response, unless this Warning code already appears in the response. MUST NOT be deleted from a response even after revalidation.
99 Miscellaneous warning
The warning text may include arbitrary information to be presented to a human user, or logged. A system receiving this warning MUST NOT take any automated action.
14.46 WWW-Authenticate
The WWW-Authenticate response-header field MUST be included in 401 (Unauthorized) response messages. The field value consists of at least one challenge that indicates the authentication scheme(s) and parameters applicable to the Request-URI.
WWW-Authenticate = "WWW-Authenticate" ":" 1#challenge
The HTTP access authentication process is described in section 11. User agents MUST take special care in parsing the WWW-Authenticate field value if it contains more than one challenge, or if more than one WWW-Authenticate header field is provided, since the contents of a challenge may itself contain a comma-separated list of authentication parameters.
15 Security Considerations
This section is meant to inform application developers, information providers, and users of the security limitations in HTTP/1.1 as described by this document. The discussion does not include definitive solutions to the problems revealed, though it does make some suggestions for reducing security risks.
15.1 Authentication of Clients
The Basic authentication scheme is not a secure method of user authentication, nor does it in any way protect the entity, which is transmitted in clear text across the physical network used as the carrier. HTTP does not prevent additional authentication schemes and encryption mechanisms from being employed to increase security or the addition of enhancements (such as schemes to use one-time passwords) to Basic authentication.
The most serious flaw in Basic authentication is that it results in the essentially clear text transmission of the user's password over the physical network. It is this problem which Digest Authentication attempts to address.
Because Basic authentication involves the clear text transmission of passwords it SHOULD never be used (without enhancements) to protect sensitive or valuable information.
A common use of Basic authentication is for identification purposes -- requiring the user to provide a user name and password as a means of identification, for example, for purposes of gathering accurate usage statistics on a server. When used in this way it is tempting to think that there is no danger in its use if illicit access to the protected documents is not a major concern. This is only correct if the server issues both user name and password to the users and in particular does not allow the user to choose his or her own password. The danger arises because naive users frequently reuse a single password to avoid the task of maintaining multiple passwords.
If a server permits users to select their own passwords, then the threat is not only illicit access to documents on the server but also illicit access to the accounts of all users who have chosen to use their account password. If users are allowed to choose their own password that also means the server must maintain files containing the (presumably encrypted) passwords. Many of these may be the account passwords of users perhaps at distant sites. The owner or administrator of such a system could conceivably incur liability if this information is not maintained in a secure fashion.
Basic Authentication is also vulnerable to spoofing by counterfeit servers. If a user can be led to believe that he is connecting to a host containing information protected by basic authentication when in fact he is connecting to a hostile server or gateway then the attacker can request a password, store it for later use, and feign an error. This type of attack is not possible with Digest Authentication [32]. Server implementers SHOULD guard against the possibility of this sort of counterfeiting by gateways or CGI scripts. In particular it is very dangerous for a server to simply turn over a connection to a gateway since that gateway can then use the persistent connection mechanism to engage in multiple transactions with the client while impersonating the original server in a way that is not detectable by the client.
15.2 Offering a Choice of Authentication Schemes
An HTTP/1.1 server may return multiple challenges with a 401 (Authenticate) response, and each challenge may use a different
scheme. The order of the challenges returned to the user agent is in the order that the server would prefer they be chosen. The server should order its challenges with the "most secure" authentication scheme first. A user agent should choose as the challenge to be made to the user the first one that the user agent understands.
When the server offers choices of authentication schemes using the WWW-Authenticate header, the "security" of the authentication is only as malicious user could capture the set of challenges and try to authenticate him/herself using the weakest of the authentication schemes. Thus, the ordering serves more to protect the user's credentials than the server's information.
A possible man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack would be to add a weak authentication scheme to the set of choices, hoping that the client will use one that exposes the user's credentials (e.g. password). For this reason, the client should always use the strongest scheme that it understands from the choices accepted.
An even better MITM attack would be to remove all offered choices, and to insert a challenge that requests Basic authentication. For this reason, user agents that are concerned about this kind of attack could remember the strongest authentication scheme ever requested by a server and produce a warning message that requires user confirmation before using a weaker one. A particularly insidious way to mount such a MITM attack would be to offer a "free" proxy caching service to gullible users.
15.3 Abuse of Server Log Information
A server is in the position to save personal data about a user's requests which may identify their reading patterns or subjects of interest. This information is clearly confidential in nature and its handling may be constrained by law in certain countries. People using the HTTP protocol to provide data are responsible for ensuring that such material is not distributed without the permission of any individuals that are identifiable by the published results.
15.4 Transfer of Sensitive Information
Like any generic data transfer protocol, HTTP cannot regulate the content of the data that is transferred, nor is there any a priori method of determining the sensitivity of any particular piece of information within the context of any given request. Therefore, applications SHOULD supply as much control over this information as possible to the provider of that information. Four header fields are worth special mention in this context: Server, Via, Referer and From.
Revealing the specific software version of the server may allow the
server machine to become more vulnerable to attacks against software
that is known to contain security holes. Implementers SHOULD make the
Server header field a configurable option.
Proxies which serve as a portal through a network firewall SHOULD take special precautions regarding the transfer of header information that identifies the hosts behind the firewall. In particular, they SHOULD remove, or replace with sanitized versions, any Via fields generated behind the firewall.
The Referer field allows reading patterns to be studied and reverse links drawn. Although it can be very useful, its power can be abused if user details are not separated from the information contained in the Referer. Even when the personal information has been removed, the Referer field may indicate a private document's URI whose publication would be inappropriate.
The information sent in the From field might conflict with the user's privacy interests or their site's security policy, and hence it SHOULD NOT be transmitted without the user being able to disable, enable, and modify the contents of the field. The user MUST be able to set the contents of this field within a user preference or application defaults configuration.
We suggest, though do not require, that a convenient toggle interface be provided for the user to enable or disable the sending of From and Referer information.
15.5 Attacks Based On File and Path Names
Implementations of HTTP origin servers SHOULD be careful to restrict the documents returned by HTTP requests to be only those that were intended by the server administrators. If an HTTP server translates HTTP URIs directly into file system calls, the server MUST take special care not to serve files that were not intended to be delivered to HTTP clients. For example, UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and other operating systems use ".." as a path component to indicate a directory level above the current one. On such a system, an HTTP server MUST disallow any such construct in the Request-URI if it would otherwise allow access to a resource outside those intended to be accessible via the HTTP server. Similarly, files intended for reference only internally to the server (such as access control files, configuration files, and script code) MUST be protected from inappropriate retrieval, since they might contain sensitive information. Experience has shown that minor bugs in such HTTP server implementations have turned into security risks.
15.6 Personal Information
HTTP clients are often privy to large amounts of personal information (e.g. the user's name, location, mail address, passwords, encryption keys, etc.), and SHOULD be very careful to prevent unintentional leakage of this information via the HTTP protocol to other sources. We very strongly recommend that a convenient interface be provided for the user to control dissemination of such information, and that designers and implementers be particularly careful in this area. History shows that errors in this area are often both serious security and/or privacy problems, and often generate highly adverse publicity for the implementer's company.
15.7 Privacy Issues Connected to Accept Headers
Accept request-headers can reveal information about the user to all servers which are accessed. The Accept-Language header in particular can reveal information the user would consider to be of a private nature, because the understanding of particular languages is often strongly correlated to the membership of a particular ethnic group. User agents which offer the option to configure the contents of an Accept-Language header to be sent in every request are strongly encouraged to let the configuration process include a message which makes the user aware of the loss of privacy involved.
An approach that limits the loss of privacy would be for a user agent to omit the sending of Accept-Language headers by default, and to ask the user whether it should start sending Accept-Language headers to a server if it detects, by looking for any Vary response-header fields generated by the server, that such sending could improve the quality of service.
Elaborate user-customized accept header fields sent in every request, in particular if these include quality values, can be used by servers as relatively reliable and long-lived user identifiers. Such user identifiers would allow content providers to do click-trail tracking, and would allow collaborating content providers to match cross-server click-trails or form submissions of individual users. Note that for many users not behind a proxy, the network address of the host running the user agent will also serve as a long-lived user identifier. In environments where proxies are used to enhance privacy, user agents should be conservative in offering accept header configuration options to end users. As an extreme privacy measure, proxies could filter the accept headers in relayed requests. General purpose user agents which provide a high degree of header configurability should warn users about the loss of privacy which can be involved.
15.8 DNS Spoofing
Clients using HTTP rely heavily on the Domain Name Service, and are thus generally prone to security attacks based on the deliberate mis-association of IP addresses and DNS names. Clients need to be cautious in assuming the continuing validity of an IP number/DNS name association.
In particular, HTTP clients SHOULD rely on their name resolver for confirmation of an IP number/DNS name association, rather than caching the result of previous host name lookups. Many platforms already can cache host name lookups locally when appropriate, and they SHOULD be configured to do so. These lookups should be cached, however, only when the TTL (Time To Live) information reported by the name server makes it likely that the cached information will remain useful.
If HTTP clients cache the results of host name lookups in order to achieve a performance improvement, they MUST observe the TTL information reported by DNS.
If HTTP clients do not observe this rule, they could be spoofed when a previously-accessed server's IP address changes. As network renumbering is expected to become increasingly common, the possibility of this form of attack will grow. Observing this requirement thus reduces this potential security vulnerability.
This requirement also improves the load-balancing behavior of clients for replicated servers using the same DNS name and reduces the likelihood of a user's experiencing failure in accessing sites which use that strategy.
15.9 Location Headers and Spoofing
If a single server supports multiple organizations that do not trust one another, then it must check the values of Location and Content- Location headers in responses that are generated under control of said organizations to make sure that they do not attempt to invalidate resources over which they have no authority.
16 Acknowledgments
This specification makes heavy use of the augmented BNF and generic constructs defined by David H. Crocker for RFC 822. Similarly, it reuses many of the definitions provided by Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed for MIME. We hope that their inclusion in this specification will help reduce past confusion over the relationship between HTTP and Internet mail message formats.
The HTTP protocol has evolved considerably over the past four years. It has benefited from a large and active developer community--the many people who have participated on the www-talk mailing list--and it is that community which has been most responsible for the success of HTTP and of the World-Wide Web in general. Marc Andreessen, Robert Cailliau, Daniel W. Connolly, Bob Denny, John Franks, Jean-Francois Groff, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker, Hakon W. Lie, Ari Luotonen, Rob McCool, Lou Montulli, Dave Raggett, Tony Sanders, and Marc VanHeyningen deserve special recognition for their efforts in defining early aspects of the protocol.
This document has benefited greatly from the comments of all those participating in the HTTP-WG. In addition to those already mentioned, the following individuals have contributed to this specification:
Gary Adams Albert Lunde
Harald Tveit Alvestrand John C. Mallery
Keith Ball Jean-Philippe Martin-Flatin
Brian Behlendorf Larry Masinter
Paul Burchard Mitra
Maurizio Codogno David Morris
Mike Cowlishaw Gavin Nicol
Roman Czyborra Bill Perry
Michael A. Dolan Jeffrey Perry
David J. Fiander Scott Powers
Alan Freier Owen Rees
Marc Hedlund Luigi Rizzo
Greg Herlihy David Robinson
Koen Holtman Marc Salomon
Alex Hopmann Rich Salz
Bob Jernigan Allan M. Schiffman
Shel Kaphan Jim Seidman
Rohit Khare Chuck Shotton
John Klensin Eric W. Sink
Martijn Koster Simon E. Spero
Alexei Kosut Richard N. Taylor
David M. Kristol Robert S. Thau
Daniel LaLiberte Bill (BearHeart) Weinman
Ben Laurie Francois Yergeau
Paul J. Leach Mary Ellen Zurko
Daniel DuBois
Much of the content and presentation of the caching design is due to suggestions and comments from individuals including: Shel Kaphan, Paul Leach, Koen Holtman, David Morris, and Larry Masinter.
Most of the specification of ranges is based on work originally done
by Ari Luotonen and John Franks, with additional input from Steve
Zilles.
Thanks to the "cave men" of Palo Alto. You know who you are.
Jim Gettys (the current editor of this document) wishes particularly to thank Roy Fielding, the previous editor of this document, along with John Klensin, Jeff Mogul, Paul Leach, Dave Kristol, Koen Holtman, John Franks, Alex Hopmann, and Larry Masinter for their help.
17 References
[1] Alvestrand, H., "Tags for the identification of languages", RFC 1766, UNINETT, March 1995.
[2] Anklesaria, F., McCahill, M., Lindner, P., Johnson, D., Torrey, D., and B. Alberti. "The Internet Gopher Protocol: (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol)", RFC 1436, University of Minnesota, March 1993.
[3] Berners-Lee, T., "Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW", A Unifying Syntax for the Expression of Names and Addresses of Objects on the Network as used in the World-Wide Web", RFC 1630, CERN, June 1994.
[4] Berners-Lee, T., Masinter, L., and M. McCahill, "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)", RFC 1738, CERN, Xerox PARC, University of Minnesota, December 1994.
[5] Berners-Lee, T., and D. Connolly, "HyperText Markup Language Specification - 2.0", RFC 1866, MIT/LCS, November 1995.
[6] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and H. Frystyk, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0.", RFC 1945 MIT/LCS, UC Irvine, May 1996.
[7] Freed, N., and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 2045, Innosoft, First Virtual, November 1996.
[8] Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet hosts - application and support", STD 3, RFC 1123, IETF, October 1989.
[9] Crocker, D., "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages", STD 11, RFC 822, UDEL, August 1982.
[10] Davis, F., Kahle, B., Morris, H., Salem, J., Shen, T., Wang, R.,
Sui, J., and M. Grinbaum. "WAIS Interface Protocol Prototype
Functional Specification", (v1.5), Thinking Machines Corporation,
April 1990.
[11] Fielding, R., "Relative Uniform Resource Locators", RFC 1808, UC Irvine, June 1995.
[12] Horton, M., and R. Adams. "Standard for interchange of USENET messages", RFC 1036, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Center for Seismic Studies, December 1987.
[13] Kantor, B., and P. Lapsley. "Network News Transfer Protocol." A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News", RFC 977, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, February 1986.
[14] Moore, K., "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text", RFC 2047, University of Tennessee, November 1996.
[15] Nebel, E., and L. Masinter. "Form-based File Upload in HTML", RFC 1867, Xerox Corporation, November 1995.
[16] Postel, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", STD 10, RFC 821, USC/ISI, August 1982.
[17] Postel, J., "Media Type Registration Procedure", RFC 2048, USC/ISI, November 1996.
[18] Postel, J., and J. Reynolds, "File Transfer Protocol (FTP)", STD 9, RFC 959, USC/ISI, October 1985.
[19] Reynolds, J., and J. Postel, "Assigned Numbers", STD 2, RFC 1700, USC/ISI, October 1994.
[20] Sollins, K., and L. Masinter, "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names", RFC 1737, MIT/LCS, Xerox Corporation, December 1994.
[21] US-ASCII. Coded Character Set - 7-Bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Standard ANSI X3.4-1986, ANSI, 1986.
[22] ISO-8859. International Standard -- Information Processing --
8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets -- Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1, ISO 8859-1:1987. Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, ISO 8859-2, 1987. Part 3: Latin alphabet No. 3, ISO 8859-3, 1988. Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4, ISO 8859-4, 1988.
Part 5: Latin/Cyrillic alphabet, ISO 8859-5, 1988. Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, ISO 8859-6, 1987. Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet, ISO 8859-7, 1987. Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet, ISO 8859-8, 1988. Part 9: Latin alphabet No. 5, ISO 8859-9, 1990.
[23] Meyers, J., and M. Rose "The Content-MD5 Header Field", RFC 1864, Carnegie Mellon, Dover Beach Consulting, October, 1995.
[24] Carpenter, B., and Y. Rekhter, "Renumbering Needs Work", RFC 1900, IAB, February 1996.
[25] Deutsch, P., "GZIP file format specification version 4.3." RFC 1952, Aladdin Enterprises, May 1996.
[26] Venkata N. Padmanabhan and Jeffrey C. Mogul. Improving HTTP Latency. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, v. 28, pp. 25-35, Dec. 1995. Slightly revised version of paper in Proc. 2nd International WWW Conf. '94: Mosaic and the Web, Oct. 1994, which is available at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/DDay/mogul/ HTTPLatency.html.
[27] Joe Touch, John Heidemann, and Katia Obraczka, "Analysis of HTTP Performance", <URL: http://www.isi.edu/lsam/ib/http-perf/>, USC/Information Sciences Institute, June 1996
[28] Mills, D., "Network Time Protocol, Version 3, Specification, Implementation and Analysis", RFC 1305, University of Delaware, March 1992.
[29] Deutsch, P., "DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification version 1.3." RFC 1951, Aladdin Enterprises, May 1996.
[30] Spero, S., "Analysis of HTTP Performance Problems" <URL:http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdma-release/http-prob.html>.
[31] Deutsch, P., and J-L. Gailly, "ZLIB Compressed Data Format Specification version 3.3", RFC 1950, Aladdin Enterprises, Info-ZIP, May 1996.
[32] Franks, J., Hallam-Baker, P., Hostetler, J., Leach, P., Luotonen, A., Sink, E., and L. Stewart, "An Extension to HTTP : Digest Access Authentication", RFC 2069, January 1997.
18 Authors' Addresses
Roy T. Fielding Department of Information and Computer Science University of California Irvine, CA 92717-3425, USA
Fax: +1 (714) 824-4056 EMail: [email protected]
Jim Gettys
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Fax: +1 (617) 258 8682 EMail: [email protected]
Jeffrey C. Mogul
Western Research Laboratory
Digital Equipment Corporation
250 University Avenue
Palo Alto, California, 94305, USA
EMail: [email protected]
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen
W3 Consortium
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Fax: +1 (617) 258 8682 EMail: [email protected]
Tim Berners-Lee
Director, W3 Consortium
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Fax: +1 (617) 258 8682 EMail: [email protected]
19 Appendices
19.1 Internet Media Type message/http
In addition to defining the HTTP/1.1 protocol, this document serves as the specification for the Internet media type "message/http". The following is to be registered with IANA.
Media Type name: message Media subtype name: http Required parameters: none Optional parameters: version, msgtype
version: The HTTP-Version number of the enclosed message
(e.g., "1.1"). If not present, the version can be
determined from the first line of the body.
msgtype: The message type -- "request" or "response". If not
present, the type can be determined from the first
line of the body.
Encoding considerations: only "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" are
permitted
Security considerations: none
19.2 Internet Media Type multipart/byteranges
When an HTTP message includes the content of multiple ranges (for example, a response to a request for multiple non-overlapping ranges), these are transmitted as a multipart MIME message. The multipart media type for this purpose is called "multipart/byteranges".
The multipart/byteranges media type includes two or more parts, each with its own Content-Type and Content-Range fields. The parts are separated using a MIME boundary parameter.
Media Type name: multipart
Media subtype name: byteranges
Required parameters: boundary
Optional parameters: none
Encoding considerations: only "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" are
permitted
Security considerations: none
For example:
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial content Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 06:25:24 GMT Last-modified: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 04:58:08 GMT Content-type: multipart/byteranges; boundary=THIS_STRING_SEPARATES
--THIS_STRING_SEPARATES Content-type: application/pdf Content-range: bytes 500-999/8000
...the first range... --THIS_STRING_SEPARATES Content-type: application/pdf Content-range: bytes 7000-7999/8000
...the second range --THIS_STRING_SEPARATES--
19.3 Tolerant Applications
Although this document specifies the requirements for the generation of HTTP/1.1 messages, not all applications will be correct in their implementation. We therefore recommend that operational applications be tolerant of deviations whenever those deviations can be interpreted unambiguously.
Clients SHOULD be tolerant in parsing the Status-Line and servers tolerant when parsing the Request-Line. In particular, they SHOULD accept any amount of SP or HT characters between fields, even though only a single SP is required.
The line terminator for message-header fields is the sequence CRLF. However, we recommend that applications, when parsing such headers, recognize a single LF as a line terminator and ignore the leading CR.
The character set of an entity-body should be labeled as the lowest common denominator of the character codes used within that body, with the exception that no label is preferred over the labels US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1.
Additional rules for requirements on parsing and encoding of dates and other potential problems with date encodings include:
o HTTP/1.1 clients and caches should assume that an RFC-850 date which appears to be more than 50 years in the future is in fact in the past (this helps solve the "year 2000" problem).
o An HTTP/1.1 implementation may internally represent a parsed Expires date as earlier than the proper value, but MUST NOT internally represent a parsed Expires date as later than the proper value.
o All expiration-related calculations must be done in GMT. The local time zone MUST NOT influence the calculation or comparison of an age or expiration time.
o If an HTTP header incorrectly carries a date value with a time zone other than GMT, it must be converted into GMT using the most conservative possible conversion.
19.4 Differences Between HTTP Entities and MIME Entities
HTTP/1.1 uses many of the constructs defined for Internet Mail (RFC 822) and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME ) to allow entities to be transmitted in an open variety of representations and with extensible mechanisms. However, MIME [7] discusses mail, and HTTP has a few features that are different from those described in MIME. These differences were carefully chosen to optimize performance over binary connections, to allow greater freedom in the use of new media types, to make date comparisons easier, and to acknowledge the practice of some early HTTP servers and clients.
This appendix describes specific areas where HTTP differs from MIME. Proxies and gateways to strict MIME environments SHOULD be aware of these differences and provide the appropriate conversions where necessary. Proxies and gateways from MIME environments to HTTP also need to be aware of the differences because some conversions may be required.
19.4.1 Conversion to Canonical Form
MIME requires that an Internet mail entity be converted to canonical form prior to being transferred. Section 3.7.1 of this document describes the forms allowed for subtypes of the "text" media type when transmitted over HTTP. MIME requires that content with a type of "text" represent line breaks as CRLF and forbids the use of CR or LF outside of line break sequences. HTTP allows CRLF, bare CR, and bare LF to indicate a line break within text content when a message is transmitted over HTTP.
Where it is possible, a proxy or gateway from HTTP to a strict MIME environment SHOULD translate all line breaks within the text media types described in section 3.7.1 of this document to the MIME canonical form of CRLF. Note, however, that this may be complicated by the presence of a Content-Encoding and by the fact that HTTP
allows the use of some character sets which do not use octets 13 and 10 to represent CR and LF, as is the case for some multi-byte character sets.
19.4.2 Conversion of Date Formats
HTTP/1.1 uses a restricted set of date formats (section 3.3.1) to simplify the process of date comparison. Proxies and gateways from other protocols SHOULD ensure that any Date header field present in a message conforms to one of the HTTP/1.1 formats and rewrite the date if necessary.
19.4.3 Introduction of Content-Encoding
MIME does not include any concept equivalent to HTTP/1.1's Content- Encoding header field. Since this acts as a modifier on the media type, proxies and gateways from HTTP to MIME-compliant protocols MUST either change the value of the Content-Type header field or decode the entity-body before forwarding the message. (Some experimental applications of Content-Type for Internet mail have used a media-type parameter of ";conversions=<content-coding>" to perform an equivalent function as Content-Encoding. However, this parameter is not part of MIME.)
19.4.4 No Content-Transfer-Encoding
HTTP does not use the Content-Transfer-Encoding (CTE) field of MIME. Proxies and gateways from MIME-compliant protocols to HTTP MUST remove any non-identity CTE ("quoted-printable" or "base64") encoding prior to delivering the response message to an HTTP client.
Proxies and gateways from HTTP to MIME-compliant protocols are responsible for ensuring that the message is in the correct format and encoding for safe transport on that protocol, where "safe transport" is defined by the limitations of the protocol being used. Such a proxy or gateway SHOULD label the data with an appropriate Content-Transfer-Encoding if doing so will improve the likelihood of safe transport over the destination protocol.
19.4.5 HTTP Header Fields in Multipart Body-Parts
In MIME, most header fields in multipart body-parts are generally ignored unless the field name begins with "Content-". In HTTP/1.1, multipart body-parts may contain any HTTP header fields which are significant to the meaning of that part.
19.4.6 Introduction of Transfer-Encoding
HTTP/1.1 introduces the Transfer-Encoding header field (section 14.40). Proxies/gateways MUST remove any transfer coding prior to forwarding a message via a MIME-compliant protocol.
A process for decoding the "chunked" transfer coding (section 3.6) can be represented in pseudo-code as:
length := 0
read chunk-size, chunk-ext (if any) and CRLF
while (chunk-size > 0) {
read chunk-data and CRLF
append chunk-data to entity-body
length := length + chunk-size
read chunk-size and CRLF
}
read entity-header
while (entity-header not empty) {
append entity-header to existing header fields
read entity-header
}
Content-Length := length
Remove "chunked" from Transfer-Encoding
19.4.7 MIME-Version
HTTP is not a MIME-compliant protocol (see appendix 19.4). However, HTTP/1.1 messages may include a single MIME-Version general-header field to indicate what version of the MIME protocol was used to construct the message. Use of the MIME-Version header field indicates that the message is in full compliance with the MIME protocol. Proxies/gateways are responsible for ensuring full compliance (where possible) when exporting HTTP messages to strict MIME environments.
MIME-Version = "MIME-Version" ":" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT
MIME version "1.0" is the default for use in HTTP/1.1. However, HTTP/1.1 message parsing and semantics are defined by this document and not the MIME specification.
19.5 Changes from HTTP/1.0
This section summarizes major differences between versions HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.
19.5.1 Changes to Simplify Multi-homed Web Servers and Conserve IP
Addresses
The requirements that clients and servers support the Host request- header, report an error if the Host request-header (section 14.23) is missing from an HTTP/1.1 request, and accept absolute URIs (section 5.1.2) are among the most important changes defined by this specification.
Older HTTP/1.0 clients assumed a one-to-one relationship of IP addresses and servers; there was no other established mechanism for distinguishing the intended server of a request than the IP address to which that request was directed. The changes outlined above will allow the Internet, once older HTTP clients are no longer common, to support multiple Web sites from a single IP address, greatly simplifying large operational Web servers, where allocation of many IP addresses to a single host has created serious problems. The Internet will also be able to recover the IP addresses that have been allocated for the sole purpose of allowing special-purpose domain names to be used in root-level HTTP URLs. Given the rate of growth of the Web, and the number of servers already deployed, it is extremely important that all implementations of HTTP (including updates to existing HTTP/1.0 applications) correctly implement these requirements:
o Both clients and servers MUST support the Host request-header.
o Host request-headers are required in HTTP/1.1 requests.
o Servers MUST report a 400 (Bad Request) error if an HTTP/1.1
request does not include a Host request-header.
o Servers MUST accept absolute URIs.
19.6 Additional Features
This appendix documents protocol elements used by some existing HTTP implementations, but not consistently and correctly across most HTTP/1.1 applications. Implementers should be aware of these features, but cannot rely upon their presence in, or interoperability with, other HTTP/1.1 applications. Some of these describe proposed experimental features, and some describe features that experimental deployment found lacking that are now addressed in the base HTTP/1.1 specification.
19.6.1 Additional Request Methods
19.6.1.1 PATCH
The PATCH method is similar to PUT except that the entity contains a list of differences between the original version of the resource identified by the Request-URI and the desired content of the resource after the PATCH action has been applied. The list of differences is in a format defined by the media type of the entity (e.g., "application/diff") and MUST include sufficient information to allow the server to recreate the changes necessary to convert the original version of the resource to the desired version.
If the request passes through a cache and the Request-URI identifies a currently cached entity, that entity MUST be removed from the cache. Responses to this method are not cachable.
The actual method for determining how the patched resource is placed, and what happens to its predecessor, is defined entirely by the origin server. If the original version of the resource being patched included a Content-Version header field, the request entity MUST include a Derived-From header field corresponding to the value of the original Content-Version header field. Applications are encouraged to use these fields for constructing versioning relationships and resolving version conflicts.
PATCH requests must obey the message transmission requirements set out in section 8.2.
Caches that implement PATCH should invalidate cached responses as defined in section 13.10 for PUT.
19.6.1.2 LINK
The LINK method establishes one or more Link relationships between the existing resource identified by the Request-URI and other existing resources. The difference between LINK and other methods
allowing links to be established between resources is that the LINK method does not allow any message-body to be sent in the request and does not directly result in the creation of new resources.
If the request passes through a cache and the Request-URI identifies a currently cached entity, that entity MUST be removed from the cache. Responses to this method are not cachable.
Caches that implement LINK should invalidate cached responses as defined in section 13.10 for PUT.
19.6.1.3 UNLINK
The UNLINK method removes one or more Link relationships from the existing resource identified by the Request-URI. These relationships may have been established using the LINK method or by any other method supporting the Link header. The removal of a link to a resource does not imply that the resource ceases to exist or becomes inaccessible for future references.
If the request passes through a cache and the Request-URI identifies a currently cached entity, that entity MUST be removed from the cache. Responses to this method are not cachable.
Caches that implement UNLINK should invalidate cached responses as defined in section 13.10 for PUT.
19.6.2 Additional Header Field Definitions
19.6.2.1 Alternates
The Alternates response-header field has been proposed as a means for the origin server to inform the client about other available representations of the requested resource, along with their distinguishing attributes, and thus providing a more reliable means for a user agent to perform subsequent selection of another representation which better fits the desires of its user (described as agent-driven negotiation in section 12).
The Alternates header field is orthogonal to the Vary header field in that both may coexist in a message without affecting the interpretation of the response or the available representations. It is expected that Alternates will provide a significant improvement over the server-driven negotiation provided by the Vary field for those resources that vary over common dimensions like type and language.
The Alternates header field will be defined in a future specification.
19.6.2.2 Content-Version
The Content-Version entity-header field defines the version tag associated with a rendition of an evolving entity. Together with the Derived-From field described in section 19.6.2.3, it allows a group of people to work simultaneously on the creation of a work as an iterative process. The field should be used to allow evolution of a particular work along a single path rather than derived works or renditions in different representations.
Content-Version = "Content-Version" ":" quoted-string
Examples of the Content-Version field include:
Content-Version: "2.1.2"
Content-Version: "Fred 19950116-12:26:48"
Content-Version: "2.5a4-omega7"
19.6.2.3 Derived-From
The Derived-From entity-header field can be used to indicate the version tag of the resource from which the enclosed entity was derived before modifications were made by the sender. This field is used to help manage the process of merging successive changes to a resource, particularly when such changes are being made in parallel and from multiple sources.
Derived-From = "Derived-From" ":" quoted-string
An example use of the field is:
Derived-From: "2.1.1"
The Derived-From field is required for PUT and PATCH requests if the entity being sent was previously retrieved from the same URI and a Content-Version header was included with the entity when it was last retrieved.
19.6.2.4 Link
The Link entity-header field provides a means for describing a relationship between two resources, generally between the requested resource and some other resource. An entity MAY include multiple Link values. Links at the metainformation level typically indicate relationships like hierarchical structure and navigation paths. The Link field is semantically equivalent to the <LINK> element in HTML.[5]
Link = "Link" ":" #("<" URI ">" *( ";" link-param )
link-param = ( ( "rel" "=" relationship )
| ( "rev" "=" relationship )
| ( "title" "=" quoted-string )
| ( "anchor" "=" <"> URI <"> )
| ( link-extension ) )
link-extension = token [ "=" ( token | quoted-string ) ]
relationship = sgml-name
| ( <"> sgml-name *( SP sgml-name) <"> )
sgml-name = ALPHA *( ALPHA | DIGIT | "." | "-" )
Relationship values are case-insensitive and MAY be extended within the constraints of the sgml-name syntax. The title parameter MAY be used to label the destination of a link such that it can be used as identification within a human-readable menu. The anchor parameter MAY be used to indicate a source anchor other than the entire current resource, such as a fragment of this resource or a third resource.
Examples of usage include:
Link: <http://www.cern.ch/TheBook/chapter2>; rel="Previous"
Link: <mailto:[email protected]>; rev="Made"; title="Tim Berners-Lee"
The first example indicates that chapter2 is previous to this resource in a logical navigation path. The second indicates that the person responsible for making the resource available is identified by the given e-mail address.
19.6.2.5 URI
The URI header field has, in past versions of this specification, been used as a combination of the existing Location, Content- Location, and Vary header fields as well as the future Alternates
field (above). Its primary purpose has been to include a list of additional URIs for the resource, including names and mirror locations. However, it has become clear that the combination of many different functions within this single field has been a barrier to consistently and correctly implementing any of those functions. Furthermore, we believe that the identification of names and mirror locations would be better performed via the Link header field. The URI header field is therefore deprecated in favor of those other fields.
URI-header = "URI" ":" 1#( "<" URI ">" )
19.7 Compatibility with Previous Versions
It is beyond the scope of a protocol specification to mandate compliance with previous versions. HTTP/1.1 was deliberately designed, however, to make supporting previous versions easy. It is worth noting that at the time of composing this specification, we would expect commercial HTTP/1.1 servers to:
o recognize the format of the Request-Line for HTTP/0.9, 1.0, and 1.1 requests;
o understand any valid request in the format of HTTP/0.9, 1.0, or 1.1;
o respond appropriately with a message in the same major version used by the client.
And we would expect HTTP/1.1 clients to:
o recognize the format of the Status-Line for HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 responses;
o understand any valid response in the format of HTTP/0.9, 1.0, or 1.1.
For most implementations of HTTP/1.0, each connection is established by the client prior to the request and closed by the server after sending the response. A few implementations implement the Keep-Alive version of persistent connections described in section 19.7.1.1.
19.7.1 Compatibility with HTTP/1.0 Persistent Connections
Some clients and servers may wish to be compatible with some previous implementations of persistent connections in HTTP/1.0 clients and servers. Persistent connections in HTTP/1.0 must be explicitly negotiated as they are not the default behavior. HTTP/1.0 experimental implementations of persistent connections are faulty, and the new facilities in HTTP/1.1 are designed to rectify these problems. The problem was that some existing 1.0 clients may be sending Keep-Alive to a proxy server that doesn't understand Connection, which would then erroneously forward it to the next inbound server, which would establish the Keep-Alive connection and result in a hung HTTP/1.0 proxy waiting for the close on the response. The result is that HTTP/1.0 clients must be prevented from using Keep-Alive when talking to proxies.
However, talking to proxies is the most important use of persistent connections, so that prohibition is clearly unacceptable. Therefore, we need some other mechanism for indicating a persistent connection is desired, which is safe to use even when talking to an old proxy that ignores Connection. Persistent connections are the default for HTTP/1.1 messages; we introduce a new keyword (Connection: close) for declaring non-persistence.
The following describes the original HTTP/1.0 form of persistent connections.
When it connects to an origin server, an HTTP client MAY send the Keep-Alive connection-token in addition to the Persist connection- token:
Connection: Keep-Alive
An HTTP/1.0 server would then respond with the Keep-Alive connection token and the client may proceed with an HTTP/1.0 (or Keep-Alive) persistent connection.
An HTTP/1.1 server may also establish persistent connections with HTTP/1.0 clients upon receipt of a Keep-Alive connection token. However, a persistent connection with an HTTP/1.0 client cannot make use of the chunked transfer-coding, and therefore MUST use a Content-Length for marking the ending boundary of each message.
A client MUST NOT send the Keep-Alive connection token to a proxy server as HTTP/1.0 proxy servers do not obey the rules of HTTP/1.1 for parsing the Connection header field.
19.7.1.1 The Keep-Alive Header
When the Keep-Alive connection-token has been transmitted with a request or a response, a Keep-Alive header field MAY also be included. The Keep-Alive header field takes the following form:
Keep-Alive-header = "Keep-Alive" ":" 0# keepalive-param
keepalive-param = param-name "=" value
The Keep-Alive header itself is optional, and is used only if a parameter is being sent. HTTP/1.1 does not define any parameters.
If the Keep-Alive header is sent, the corresponding connection token MUST be transmitted. The Keep-Alive header MUST be ignored if received without the connection token.
