HTTP Header Registries

Wednesday, 8 September 2004

Ever wonder where the heck a particular HTTP header is defined?

HTTP defined a whole bunch of them, but it didn’t stop there; over the years, a number have been added in IETF RFCs, W3C Technical Reports, and lots of other less formal places.

To make it easier to find them, I’ve put together (with help from Jeff Mogul) a listing of them, to be included in the Message Header registry that Graham Klyne put together (with a little help from Jeff and I).

Comments and suggestions would be very appreciated.

Thanks to the registry-generating software that Graham came up with, we also have some experimental HTML pages of the permanent registry entries, as well as those in the provisional repository.

2 Comments

Stelios G. Sfakianakis said:

Hi,

The links to the RFCs in the permanent and the provisional repositories are not corrent, e.g. in https://www.mnot.net/drafts/draft-nottingham-hdrreg-http/http/Accept-Additions.html the link to the RFC 2616 is https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfcRFC2616.txt instead of the valid https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Cheers Stelios

Wednesday, September 8 2004 at 11:35 AM

James Antill said:

I’ve thought about doing something similar, due to all the extra headers needed in http/1.1 just to get pipelining. However one of my biggest annoyances is that it’s not always obvious what is MAY, SHOULD, MUST and it’s not obvious which headers are for clients/servers/proxies. I’d really like something that said if you want to be a HTTP/1.1 server you must understand these headers and must send these … you also should understand these and should send these. And the same for clients, Ie. to be a HTTP/1.1 client you must send these, and understand these.

Wednesday, September 15 2004 at 3:20 AM

mark nottingham

other HTTP posts