| HTTPbis Working Group | R. Fielding, Editor |
| Internet-Draft | Day Software |
| Obsoletes: 2616 (if approved) | J. Gettys |
| Intended status: Standards Track | One Laptop per Child |
| Expires: April 29, 2010 | J. Mogul |
| HP | |
| H. Frystyk | |
| Microsoft | |
| L. Masinter | |
| Adobe Systems | |
| P. Leach | |
| Microsoft | |
| T. Berners-Lee | |
| W3C/MIT | |
| Y. Lafon, Editor | |
| W3C | |
| J. Reschke, Editor | |
| greenbytes | |
| October 26, 2009 |
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The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP has been in use by the World Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This document is Part 3 of the seven-part specification that defines the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.1" and, taken together, obsoletes RFC 2616. Part 3 defines HTTP message content, metadata, and content negotiation.¶
Discussion of this draft should take place on the HTTPBIS working group mailing list (ietf-http-wg@w3.org). The current issues list is at <http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/report/11> and related documents (including fancy diffs) can be found at <http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/>.¶
The changes in this draft are summarized in Appendix E.9.¶
This document defines HTTP/1.1 message payloads (a.k.a., content), the associated metadata header fields that define how the payload is intended to be interpreted by a recipient, the request header fields that may influence content selection, and the various selection algorithms that are collectively referred to as HTTP content negotiation.¶
This document is currently disorganized in order to minimize the changes between drafts and enable reviewers to see the smaller errata changes. The next draft will reorganize the sections to better reflect the content. In particular, the sections on entities will be renamed payload and moved to the first half of the document, while the sections on content negotiation and associated request header fields will be moved to the second half. The current mess reflects how widely dispersed these topics and associated requirements had become in [RFC2616].¶
This specification uses a number of terms to refer to the roles played by participants in, and objects of, the HTTP communication.¶
content negotiation ¶
entity ¶
representation ¶
variant ¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].¶
An implementation is not compliant if it fails to satisfy one or more of the MUST or REQUIRED level requirements for the protocols it implements. An implementation that satisfies all the MUST or REQUIRED level and all the SHOULD level requirements for its protocols is said to be "unconditionally compliant"; one that satisfies all the MUST level requirements but not all the SHOULD level requirements for its protocols is said to be "conditionally compliant."¶
This specification uses the ABNF syntax defined in Section 1.2 of [Part1] (which extends the syntax defined in [RFC5234] with a list rule). Appendix D shows the collected ABNF, with the list rule expanded.¶
The following core rules are included by reference, as defined in [RFC5234], Appendix B.1: ALPHA (letters), CR (carriage return), CRLF (CR LF), CTL (controls), DIGIT (decimal 0-9), DQUOTE (double quote), HEXDIG (hexadecimal 0-9/A-F/a-f), LF (line feed), OCTET (any 8-bit sequence of data), SP (space), VCHAR (any visible USASCII character), and WSP (whitespace).¶
The core rules below are defined in Section 1.2.2 of [Part1]:¶
quoted-string = <quoted-string, defined in [Part1], Section 1.2.2> token = <token, defined in [Part1], Section 1.2.2> OWS = <OWS, defined in [Part1], Section 1.2.2>
The ABNF rules below are defined in other parts:¶
absolute-URI = <absolute-URI, defined in [Part1], Section 2.6> Content-Length = <Content-Length, defined in [Part1], Section 9.2> header-field = <header-field, defined in [Part1], Section 3.2> partial-URI = <partial-URI, defined in [Part1], Section 2.6> qvalue = <qvalue, defined in [Part1], Section 6.4>
Last-Modified = <Last-Modified, defined in [Part4], Section 6.6>
Content-Range = <Content-Range, defined in [Part5], Section 5.2>
Expires = <Expires, defined in [Part6], Section 3.3>
HTTP uses the same definition of the term "character set" as that described for MIME:¶
The term "character set" is used in this document to refer to a method used with one or more tables to convert a sequence of octets into a sequence of characters. Note that unconditional conversion in the other direction is not required, in that not all characters may be available in a given character set and a character set may provide more than one sequence of octets to represent a particular character. This definition is intended to allow various kinds of character encoding, from simple single-table mappings such as US-ASCII to complex table switching methods such as those that use ISO-2022's techniques. However, the definition associated with a MIME character set name MUST fully specify the mapping to be performed from octets to characters. In particular, use of external profiling information to determine the exact mapping is not permitted.¶
HTTP character sets are identified by case-insensitive tokens. The complete set of tokens is defined by the IANA Character Set registry (<http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets>).¶
Although HTTP allows an arbitrary token to be used as a charset value, any token that has a predefined value within the IANA Character Set registry MUST represent the character set defined by that registry. Applications SHOULD limit their use of character sets to those defined by the IANA registry.¶
HTTP uses charset in two contexts: within an Accept-Charset request header (in which the charset value is an unquoted token) and as the value of a parameter in a Content-Type header (within a request or response), in which case the parameter value of the charset parameter may be quoted.¶
Some HTTP/1.0 software has interpreted a Content-Type header without charset parameter incorrectly to mean "recipient should guess." Senders wishing to defeat this behavior MAY include a charset parameter even when the charset is ISO-8859-1 ([ISO-8859-1]) and SHOULD do so when it is known that it will not confuse the recipient.¶
Unfortunately, some older HTTP/1.0 clients did not deal properly with an explicit charset parameter. HTTP/1.1 recipients MUST respect the charset label provided by the sender; and those user agents that have a provision to "guess" a charset MUST use the charset from the content-type field if they support that charset, rather than the recipient's preference, when initially displaying a document. See Section 2.3.1.¶
Content coding values indicate an encoding transformation that has been or can be applied to an entity. Content codings are primarily used to allow a document to be compressed or otherwise usefully transformed without losing the identity of its underlying media type and without loss of information. Frequently, the entity is stored in coded form, transmitted directly, and only decoded by the recipient.¶
All content-coding values are case-insensitive. HTTP/1.1 uses content-coding values in the Accept-Encoding (Section 5.3) and Content-Encoding (Section 5.5) header fields. Although the value describes the content-coding, what is more important is that it indicates what decoding mechanism will be required to remove the encoding.¶
compress ¶
deflate ¶
gzip ¶
identity ¶
The HTTP Content Coding Registry defines the name space for the content coding names.¶
Registrations MUST include the following fields: ¶
Values to be added to this name space require expert review and a specification (see "Expert Review" and "Specification Required" in Section 4.1 of [RFC5226]), and MUST conform to the purpose of content coding defined in this section.¶
The registry itself is maintained at <http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters>.¶
HTTP uses Internet Media Types [RFC2046] in the Content-Type (Section 5.9) and Accept (Section 5.1) header fields in order to provide open and extensible data typing and type negotiation.¶
Parameters MAY follow the type/subtype in the form of attribute/value pairs.¶
The type, subtype, and parameter attribute names are case-insensitive. Parameter values might or might not be case-sensitive, depending on the semantics of the parameter name. The presence or absence of a parameter might be significant to the processing of a media-type, depending on its definition within the media type registry.¶
A parameter value that matches the token production may be transmitted as either a token or within a quoted-string. The quoted and unquoted values are equivalent.¶
Note that some older HTTP applications do not recognize media type parameters. When sending data to older HTTP applications, implementations SHOULD only use media type parameters when they are required by that type/subtype definition.¶
Media-type values are registered with the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA). The media type registration process is outlined in [RFC4288]. Use of non-registered media types is discouraged.¶
Internet media types are registered with a canonical form. An entity-body transferred via HTTP messages MUST be represented in the appropriate canonical form prior to its transmission except for "text" types, as defined in the next paragraph.¶
When in canonical form, media subtypes of the "text" type use CRLF as the text line break. HTTP relaxes this requirement and allows the transport of text media with plain CR or LF alone representing a line break when it is done consistently for an entire entity-body. HTTP applications MUST accept CRLF, bare CR, and bare LF as being representative of a line break in text media received via HTTP. In addition, if the text is represented in a character set that does not use octets 13 and 10 for CR and LF respectively, as is the case for some multi-byte character sets, HTTP allows the use of whatever octet sequences are defined by that character set to represent the equivalent of CR and LF for line breaks. This flexibility regarding line breaks applies only to text media in the entity-body; a bare CR or LF MUST NOT be substituted for CRLF within any of the HTTP control structures (such as header fields and multipart boundaries).¶
If an entity-body is encoded with a content-coding, the underlying data MUST be in a form defined above prior to being encoded.¶
The "charset" parameter is used with some media types to define the character set (Section 2.1) of the data. When no explicit charset parameter is provided by the sender, media subtypes of the "text" type are defined to have a default charset value of "ISO-8859-1" when received via HTTP. Data in character sets other than "ISO-8859-1" or its subsets MUST be labeled with an appropriate charset value. See Section 2.1.1 for compatibility problems.¶
MIME provides for a number of "multipart" types -- encapsulations of one or more entities within a single message-body. All multipart types share a common syntax, as defined in Section 5.1.1 of [RFC2046], and MUST include a boundary parameter as part of the media type value. The message body is itself a protocol element and MUST therefore use only CRLF to represent line breaks between body-parts. Unlike in RFC 2046, the epilogue of any multipart message MUST be empty; HTTP applications MUST NOT transmit the epilogue (even if the original multipart contains an epilogue). These restrictions exist in order to preserve the self-delimiting nature of a multipart message-body, wherein the "end" of the message-body is indicated by the ending multipart boundary.¶
In general, HTTP treats a multipart message-body no differently than any other media type: strictly as payload. The one exception is the "multipart/byteranges" type (Appendix A of [Part5]) when it appears in a 206 (Partial Content) response. In all other cases, an HTTP user agent SHOULD follow the same or similar behavior as a MIME user agent would upon receipt of a multipart type. The MIME header fields within each body-part of a multipart message-body do not have any significance to HTTP beyond that defined by their MIME semantics.¶
In general, an HTTP user agent SHOULD follow the same or similar behavior as a MIME user agent would upon receipt of a multipart type. If an application receives an unrecognized multipart subtype, the application MUST treat it as being equivalent to "multipart/mixed".¶
Request and Response messages MAY transfer an entity if not otherwise restricted by the request method or response status code. An entity consists of entity-header fields and an entity-body, although some responses will only include the entity-headers.¶
In this section, both sender and recipient refer to either the client or the server, depending on who sends and who receives the entity.¶
Entity-header fields define metainformation about the entity-body or, if no body is present, about the resource identified by the request.¶
entity-header = Content-Encoding ; Section 5.5 / Content-Language ; Section 5.6 / Content-Length ; [Part1], Section 9.2 / Content-Location ; Section 5.7 / Content-MD5 ; Section 5.8 / Content-Range ; [Part5], Section 5.2 / Content-Type ; Section 5.9 / Expires ; [Part6], Section 3.3 / Last-Modified ; [Part4], Section 6.6 / extension-header extension-header = header-field
The extension-header mechanism allows additional entity-header fields to be defined without changing the protocol, but these fields cannot be assumed to be recognizable by the recipient. Unrecognized header fields SHOULD be ignored by the recipient and MUST be forwarded by transparent proxies.¶
The entity-body (if any) sent with an HTTP request or response is in a format and encoding defined by the entity-header fields.¶
entity-body = *OCTET
An entity-body is only present in a message when a message-body is present, as described in Section 3.3 of [Part1]. The entity-body is obtained from the message-body by decoding any Transfer-Encoding that might have been applied to ensure safe and proper transfer of the message.¶
When an entity-body is included with a message, the data type of that body is determined via the header fields Content-Type and Content-Encoding. These define a two-layer, ordered encoding model:¶
entity-body := Content-Encoding( Content-Type( data ) )
Content-Type specifies the media type of the underlying data. Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body, unless that information is unknown. If the Content-Type header field is not present, it indicates that the sender does not know the media type of the data; recipients MAY either assume that it is "application/octet-stream" ([RFC2046], Section 4.5.1) or examine the content to determine its type.¶
Content-Encoding may be used to indicate any additional content codings applied to the data, usually for the purpose of data compression, that are a property of the requested resource. There is no default encoding.¶
The entity-length of a message is the length of the message-body before any transfer-codings have been applied. Section 3.4 of [Part1] defines how the transfer-length of a message-body is determined.¶
Most HTTP responses include an entity which contains information for interpretation by a human user. Naturally, it is desirable to supply the user with the "best available" entity corresponding to the request. Unfortunately for servers and caches, not all users have the same preferences for what is "best," and not all user agents are equally capable of rendering all entity types. For that reason, HTTP has provisions for several mechanisms for "content negotiation" -- the process of selecting the best representation for a given response when there are multiple representations available.¶
Any response containing an entity-body MAY be subject to negotiation, including error responses.¶
There are two kinds of content negotiation which are possible in HTTP: server-driven and agent-driven negotiation. These two kinds of negotiation are orthogonal and thus may be used separately or in combination. One method of combination, referred to as transparent negotiation, occurs when a cache uses the agent-driven negotiation information provided by the origin server in order to provide server-driven negotiation for subsequent requests.¶
If the selection of the best representation for a response is made by an algorithm located at the server, it is called server-driven negotiation. Selection is based on the available representations of the response (the dimensions over which it can vary; e.g. language, content-coding, etc.) and the contents of particular header fields in the request message or on other information pertaining to the request (such as the network address of the client).¶
Server-driven negotiation is advantageous when the algorithm for selecting from among the available representations is difficult to describe to the user agent, or when the server desires to send its "best guess" to the client along with the first response (hoping to avoid the round-trip delay of a subsequent request if the "best guess" is good enough for the user). In order to improve the server's guess, the user agent MAY include request header fields (Accept, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding, etc.) which describe its preferences for such a response.¶
Server-driven negotiation has disadvantages: ¶
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 5.1), Accept-Charset (Section 5.2), Accept-Encoding (Section 5.3), Accept-Language (Section 5.4), and User-Agent (Section 9.9 of [Part2]). 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.¶
The Vary header field (Section 3.5 of [Part6]) can be used to express the parameters the server uses to select a representation that is subject to server-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 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.¶
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 that could be used within HTTP/1.1.¶
This section defines the syntax and semantics of HTTP/1.1 header fields related to the payload of messages.¶
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.¶
The "Accept" request-header field can be used by user agents to specify response media types that are acceptable. 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" ":" OWS Accept-v Accept-v = #( media-range [ accept-params ] ) media-range = ( "*/*" / ( type "/" "*" ) / ( type "/" subtype ) ) *( OWS ";" OWS parameter ) accept-params = OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue *( accept-ext ) accept-ext = OWS ";" OWS 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 6.4 of [Part1]). The default value is q=1.¶
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: ¶
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:¶
| Media Type | Quality Value |
|---|---|
| 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 might 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 ought to be configurable by the user.¶
The "Accept-Charset" request-header field can be used by user agents to indicate what response character sets are acceptable. 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.¶
Accept-Charset = "Accept-Charset" ":" OWS Accept-Charset-v Accept-Charset-v = 1#( ( charset / "*" ) [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] )
Character set values are described in Section 2.1. 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
The special value "*", if present in the Accept-Charset field, matches every character set (including ISO-8859-1) which is not mentioned elsewhere in the Accept-Charset field. If no "*" is present in an Accept-Charset field, then all character sets not explicitly mentioned get a quality value of 0, except for ISO-8859-1, which gets a quality value of 1 if not explicitly mentioned.¶
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.¶
The "Accept-Encoding" request-header field can be used by user agents to indicate what response content-codings (Section 2.2) are acceptable in the response.¶
Accept-Encoding = "Accept-Encoding" ":" OWS Accept-Encoding-v Accept-Encoding-v = #( codings [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] ) codings = ( content-coding / "*" )
Each codings value MAY be given an associated quality value which represents the preference for that encoding. The default value is q=1.¶
Examples of its use are:¶
Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip Accept-Encoding: Accept-Encoding: * Accept-Encoding: compress;q=0.5, gzip;q=1.0 Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, identity; q=0.5, *;q=0
A server tests whether a content-coding is acceptable, according to an Accept-Encoding field, using these rules: ¶
If an Accept-Encoding field is present in a request, 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.¶
If no Accept-Encoding field is present in a request, the server MAY assume that the client will accept any content coding. In this case, if "identity" is one of the available content-codings, then the server SHOULD use the "identity" content-coding, unless it has additional information that a different content-coding is meaningful to the client.¶
The "Accept-Language" request-header field can be used by user agents to indicate the set of natural languages that are preferred in the response. Language tags are defined in Section 2.4.¶
Accept-Language = "Accept-Language" ":" OWS Accept-Language-v Accept-Language-v = 1#( language-range [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] ) language-range = <language-range, defined in [RFC4647], Section 2.1>
Each language-range can 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."¶
For matching, the "Basic Filtering" matching scheme, defined in Section 3.3.1 of [RFC4647], is used:¶
A language range matches a particular language tag if, in a case-insensitive comparison, it exactly equals the tag, or if it exactly equals a prefix of the tag such that the first 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.¶
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 might 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 7.1.¶
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.¶
The "Content-Encoding" entity-header field indicates what 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" ":" OWS Content-Encoding-v Content-Encoding-v = 1#content-coding
Content codings are defined in Section 2.2. An example of its use is¶
Content-Encoding: gzip
The content-coding is a characteristic of the entity identified by the request-target. Typically, the entity-body is stored with this encoding and is only decoded before rendering or analogous usage. However, a non-transparent proxy MAY modify the content-coding if the new coding is known to be acceptable to the recipient, unless the "no-transform" cache-control directive is present in the message.¶
If the content-coding of an entity is not "identity", then the response MUST include a Content-Encoding entity-header (Section 5.5) that lists the non-identity content-coding(s) used.¶
If the content-coding of an entity in a request message is not acceptable to the origin server, the server SHOULD respond with a status code of 415 (Unsupported Media Type).¶
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.¶
The "Content-Language" entity-header field describes the natural language(s) of the intended audience for the entity. Note that this might not be equivalent to all the languages used within the entity-body.¶
Content-Language = "Content-Language" ":" OWS Content-Language-v Content-Language-v = 1#language-tag
Language tags are defined in Section 2.4. 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 might 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 would properly only include "en".¶
Content-Language MAY be applied to any media type -- it is not limited to textual documents.¶
The "Content-Location" entity-header field is used to supply a URI for the entity in the message when it is accessible from a location separate from the requested resource's URI.¶
A server SHOULD provide a Content-Location for the variant corresponding to the response entity, especially 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.¶
Content-Location = "Content-Location" ":" OWS Content-Location-v Content-Location-v = absolute-URI / partial-URI
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 specify the Content-Location URI as the request-target if the desire is to identify the source of that particular entity.¶
Section 6.1 of [Part2] describes how clients may process the Content-Location header field.¶
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 2.6 of [Part6].¶
If the Content-Location is a relative URI, the relative URI is interpreted relative to the request-target.¶
The meaning of the Content-Location header in requests is undefined; servers are free to ignore it in those cases.¶
The "Content-MD5" entity-header field, as defined in [RFC1864], is an MD5 digest of the entity-body that provides an end-to-end message integrity check (MIC) of the entity-body. Note that 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" ":" OWS Content-MD5-v Content-MD5-v = <base64 of 128 bit MD5 digest as per [RFC1864]>
The Content-MD5 header field MAY be generated by an origin server or client to function as an integrity check of the entity-body. Only origin servers or clients 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-coding that has been applied, but not including any transfer-encoding 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.¶
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.¶
Conversion of all line breaks to CRLF MUST NOT be done before computing or checking the digest: the line break convention used in the text actually transmitted MUST be left unaltered when computing the digest.¶
The "Content-Type" entity-header field indicates the media type of the entity-body. In the case of responses to the HEAD method, the media type is that which would have been sent had the request been a GET.¶
Content-Type = "Content-Type" ":" OWS Content-Type-v Content-Type-v = media-type
Media types are defined in Section 2.3. 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 3.2.1.¶
The Message Header Registry located at <http://www.iana.org/assignments/message-headers/message-header-index.html> should be updated with the permanent registrations below (see [RFC3864]):¶
| Header Field Name | Protocol | Status | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accept | http | standard | Section 5.1 |
| Accept-Charset | http | standard | Section 5.2 |
| Accept-Encoding | http | standard | Section 5.3 |
| Accept-Language | http | standard | Section 5.4 |
| Content-Disposition | http | Appendix B.1 | |
| Content-Encoding | http | standard | Section 5.5 |
| Content-Language | http | standard | Section 5.6 |
| Content-Location | http | standard | Section 5.7 |
| Content-MD5 | http | standard | Section 5.8 |
| Content-Type | http | standard | Section 5.9 |
| MIME-Version | http | Appendix A.1 |
The change controller is: "IETF (iesg@ietf.org) - Internet Engineering Task Force".¶
The registration procedure for HTTP Content Codings is now defined by Section 2.2.1 of this document.¶
The HTTP Content Codings Registry located at <http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters> should be updated with the registration below:¶
| Name | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| compress | UNIX "compress" program method | Section 6.2.2.1 of [Part1] |
| deflate | "zlib" format [RFC1950] with "deflate" compression | Section 6.2.2.2 of [Part1] |
| gzip | Same as GNU zip [RFC1952] | Section 6.2.2.3 of [Part1] |
| identity | No transformation | Section 2.2 |
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.¶
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 or not to 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 ought to 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.¶
[RFC2183], from which the often implemented Content-Disposition (see Appendix B.1) header in HTTP is derived, has a number of very serious security considerations. Content-Disposition is not part of the HTTP standard, but since it is widely implemented, we are documenting its use and risks for implementors. See Section 5 of [RFC2183] for details.¶
HTTP/1.1 uses many of the constructs defined for Internet Mail ([RFC5322]) and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME [RFC2045]) to allow entities to be transmitted in an open variety of representations and with extensible mechanisms. However, RFC 2045 discusses mail, and HTTP has a few features that are different from those described in RFC 2045. 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 RFC 2045. 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 might be required.¶
HTTP is not a MIME-compliant protocol. 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 (as defined in [RFC2045]). Proxies/gateways are responsible for ensuring full compliance (where possible) when exporting HTTP messages to strict MIME environments.¶
MIME-Version = "MIME-Version" ":" OWS MIME-Version-v MIME-Version-v = 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.¶
[RFC2045] requires that an Internet mail entity be converted to canonical form prior to being transferred, as described in Section 4 of [RFC2049]. Section 2.3.1 of this document describes the forms allowed for subtypes of the "text" media type when transmitted over HTTP. [RFC2046] 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 2.3.1 of this document to the RFC 2049 canonical form of CRLF. Note, however, that this might 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.¶
Implementors should note that conversion will break any cryptographic checksums applied to the original content unless the original content is already in canonical form. Therefore, the canonical form is recommended for any content that uses such checksums in HTTP.¶
HTTP/1.1 uses a restricted set of date formats (Section 6.1 of [Part1]) 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.¶
RFC 2045 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 a function equivalent to Content-Encoding. However, this parameter is not part of RFC 2045).¶
HTTP does not use the Content-Transfer-Encoding field of RFC 2045. Proxies and gateways from MIME-compliant protocols to HTTP MUST remove any Content-Transfer-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.¶
HTTP/1.1 introduces the Transfer-Encoding header field (Section 9.7 of [Part1]). Proxies/gateways MUST remove any transfer-coding prior to forwarding a message via a MIME-compliant protocol.¶
HTTP implementations which share code with MHTML [RFC2557] implementations need to be aware of MIME line length limitations. Since HTTP does not have this limitation, HTTP does not fold long lines. MHTML messages being transported by HTTP follow all conventions of MHTML, including line length limitations and folding, canonicalization, etc., since HTTP transports all message-bodies as payload (see Section 2.3.2) and does not interpret the content or any MIME header lines that might be contained therein.¶
[RFC1945] and [RFC2068] document protocol elements used by some existing HTTP implementations, but not consistently and correctly across most HTTP/1.1 applications. Implementors are advised to 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.¶
A number of other headers, such as Content-Disposition and Title, from SMTP and MIME are also often implemented (see [RFC2076]).¶
The "Content-Disposition" response-header field has been proposed as a means for the origin server to suggest a default filename if the user requests that the content is saved to a file. This usage is derived from the definition of Content-Disposition in [RFC2183].¶
content-disposition = "Content-Disposition" ":" OWS content-disposition-v content-disposition-v = disposition-type *( OWS ";" OWS disposition-parm ) disposition-type = "attachment" / disp-extension-token disposition-parm = filename-parm / disp-extension-parm filename-parm = "filename" "=" quoted-string disp-extension-token = token disp-extension-parm = token "=" ( token / quoted-string )
An example is¶
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="fname.ext"
The receiving user agent SHOULD NOT respect any directory path information present in the filename-parm parameter, which is the only parameter believed to apply to HTTP implementations at this time. The filename SHOULD be treated as a terminal component only.¶
If this header is used in a response with the application/octet-stream content-type, the implied suggestion is that the user agent should not display the response, but directly enter a `save response as...' dialog.¶
See Section 7.2 for Content-Disposition security issues.¶
Transfer-coding and message lengths all interact in ways that required fixing exactly when chunked encoding is used (to allow for transfer encoding that may not be self delimiting); it was important to straighten out exactly how message lengths are computed. (Section 3.2.2, see also [Part1], [Part5] and [Part6]).¶
Charset wildcarding is introduced to avoid explosion of character set names in accept headers. (Section 5.2)¶
Content-Base was deleted from the specification: it was not implemented widely, and there is no simple, safe way to introduce it without a robust extension mechanism. In addition, it is used in a similar, but not identical fashion in MHTML [RFC2557].¶
A content-coding of "identity" was introduced, to solve problems discovered in caching. (Section 2.2)¶
The Alternates, Content-Version, Derived-From, Link, URI, Public and Content-Base header fields were defined in previous versions of this specification, but not commonly implemented. See Section 19.6.2 of [RFC2068].¶
Clarify contexts that charset is used in. (Section 2.1)¶
Remove base URI setting semantics for Content-Location due to poor implementation support, which was caused by too many broken servers emitting bogus Content-Location headers, and also the potentially undesirable effect of potentially breaking relative links in content-negotiated resources. (Section 5.7)¶
Remove reference to non-existant identity transfer-coding value tokens. (Appendix A.5)¶
Accept = "Accept:" OWS Accept-v Accept-Charset = "Accept-Charset:" OWS Accept-Charset-v Accept-Charset-v = *( "," OWS ) ( charset / "*" ) [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] *( OWS "," [ OWS ( charset / "*" ) [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] ] ) Accept-Encoding = "Accept-Encoding:" OWS Accept-Encoding-v Accept-Encoding-v = [ ( "," / ( codings [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] ) ) *( OWS "," [ OWS codings [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] ] ) ] Accept-Language = "Accept-Language:" OWS Accept-Language-v Accept-Language-v = *( "," OWS ) language-range [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] *( OWS "," [ OWS language-range [ OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue ] ] ) Accept-v = [ ( "," / ( media-range [ accept-params ] ) ) *( OWS "," [ OWS media-range [ accept-params ] ] ) ] Content-Encoding = "Content-Encoding:" OWS Content-Encoding-v Content-Encoding-v = *( "," OWS ) content-coding *( OWS "," [ OWS content-coding ] ) Content-Language = "Content-Language:" OWS Content-Language-v Content-Language-v = *( "," OWS ) language-tag *( OWS "," [ OWS language-tag ] ) Content-Length = <Content-Length, defined in [Part1], Section 9.2> Content-Location = "Content-Location:" OWS Content-Location-v Content-Location-v = absolute-URI / partial-URI Content-MD5 = "Content-MD5:" OWS Content-MD5-v Content-MD5-v = <base64 of 128 bit MD5 digest as per [RFC1864]> Content-Range = <Content-Range, defined in [Part5], Section 5.2> Content-Type = "Content-Type:" OWS Content-Type-v Content-Type-v = media-type Expires = <Expires, defined in [Part6], Section 3.3> Last-Modified = <Last-Modified, defined in [Part4], Section 6.6> MIME-Version = "MIME-Version:" OWS MIME-Version-v MIME-Version-v = 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT OWS = <OWS, defined in [Part1], Section 1.2.2> absolute-URI = <absolute-URI, defined in [Part1], Section 2.6> accept-ext = OWS ";" OWS token [ "=" ( token / quoted-string ) ] accept-params = OWS ";" OWS "q=" qvalue *accept-ext attribute = token charset = token codings = ( content-coding / "*" ) content-coding = token content-disposition = "Content-Disposition:" OWS content-disposition-v content-disposition-v = disposition-type *( OWS ";" OWS disposition-parm ) disp-extension-parm = token "=" ( token / quoted-string ) disp-extension-token = token disposition-parm = filename-parm / disp-extension-parm disposition-type = "attachment" / disp-extension-token entity-body = *OCTET entity-header = Content-Encoding / Content-Language / Content-Length / Content-Location / Content-MD5 / Content-Range / Content-Type / Expires / Last-Modified / extension-header extension-header = header-field filename-parm = "filename=" quoted-string header-field = <header-field, defined in [Part1], Section 3.2> language-range = <language-range, defined in [RFC4647], Section 2.1> language-tag = <Language-Tag, defined in [RFC5646], Section 2.1> media-range = ( "*/*" / ( type "/*" ) / ( type "/" subtype ) ) *( OWS ";" OWS parameter ) media-type = type "/" subtype *( OWS ";" OWS parameter ) parameter = attribute "=" value partial-URI = <partial-URI, defined in [Part1], Section 2.6> quoted-string = <quoted-string, defined in [Part1], Section 1.2.2> qvalue = <qvalue, defined in [Part1], Section 6.4> subtype = token token = <token, defined in [Part1], Section 1.2.2> type = token value = token / quoted-string
ABNF diagnostics:
; Accept defined but not used ; Accept-Charset defined but not used ; Accept-Encoding defined but not used ; Accept-Language defined but not used ; MIME-Version defined but not used ; content-disposition defined but not used ; entity-body defined but not used ; entity-header defined but not used
Closed issues: ¶
Ongoing work on ABNF conversion (<http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/36>): ¶
Closed issues: ¶
Ongoing work on IANA Message Header Registration (<http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/40>): ¶
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Other changes: ¶
Closed issues: ¶
Ongoing work on ABNF conversion (<http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/36>): ¶
Closed issues: ¶
Final work on ABNF conversion (<http://tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/36>): ¶
Other changes: ¶
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Partly resolved issues: ¶