RFC 1945

Network Working Group
Request for Comments: 1945
Category: Informational

T. Berners-Lee
MIT/LCS
R. Fielding
UC Irvine
H. Frystyk
MIT/LCS
May 1996

Status of This Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

IESG Note:

The IESG has concerns about this protocol, and expects this document to be replaced relatively soon by a standards track document.

Abstract

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary 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 (commands). A feature of HTTP is the typing 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 reflects common usage of the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.0".

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 Purpose
  • 1.2 Terminology
  • 1.3 Overall Operation
  • 1.4 HTTP and MIME
• 2. Notational Conventions and Generic Grammar
  • 2.1 Augmented BNF
  • 2.2 Basic Rules
• 3. Protocol Parameters
  • 3.1 HTTP Version
  • 3.2 Uniform Resource Identifiers
    • 3.2.1 General Syntax
    • 3.2.2 http URL
  • 3.3 Date/Time Formats
  • 3.4 Character Sets
  • 3.5 Content Codings
  • 3.6 Media Types
    • 3.6.1 Canonicalization and Text Defaults
    • 3.6.2 Multipart Types
  • 3.7 Product Tokens
• 4. HTTP Message
  • 4.1 Message Types
  • 4.2 Message Headers
  • 4.3 General Header Fields
• 5. Request
  • 5.1 Request-Line
    • 5.1.1 Method
    • 5.1.2 Request-URI
  • 5.2 Request Header Fields
• 6. Response
  • 6.1 Status-Line
    • 6.1.1 Status Code and Reason Phrase
  • 6.2 Response Header Fields
• 7. Entity
  • 7.1 Entity Header Fields
  • 7.2 Entity Body
    • 7.2.1 Type
    • 7.2.2 Length
• 8. Method Definitions
  • 8.1 GET
  • 8.2 HEAD
  • 8.3 POST
• 9. Status Code Definitions
  • 9.1 Informational 1xx
  • 9.2 Successful 2xx
  • 9.3 Redirection 3xx
  • 9.4 Client Error 4xx
  • 9.5 Server Error 5xx
• 10. Header Field Definitions
  • 10.1 Allow
  • 10.2 Authorization
  • 10.3 Content-Encoding
  • 10.4 Content-Length
  • 10.5 Content-Type
  • 10.6 Date
  • 10.7 Expires
  • 10.8 From
  • 10.9 If-Modified-Since
  • 10.10 Last-Modified
  • 10.11 Location
  • 10.12 Pragma
  • 10.13 Referer
  • 10.14 Server
  • 10.15 User-Agent
  • 10.16 WWW-Authenticate
• 11. Access Authentication
  • 11.1 Basic Authentication Scheme
• 12. Security Considerations
  • 12.1 Authentication of Clients
  • 12.2 Safe Methods
  • 12.3 Abuse of Server Log Information
  • 12.4 Transfer of Sensitive Information
  • 12.5 Attacks Based On File and Path Names
• 13. Acknowledgments
• 14. References
• 15. Authors' Addresses
• A. Internet Media Type message/http
• B. Tolerant Applications
• C. Relationship to MIME
  • C.1 Conversion to Canonical Form
  • C.2 Conversion of Date Formats
  • C.3 Introduction of Content-Encoding
  • C.4 No Content-Transfer-Encoding
  • C.5 HTTP Header Fields in Multipart Body-Parts
• D. Additional Features
  • D.1 Additional Request Methods
    • D.1.1 PUT
    • D.1.2 DELETE
    • D.1.3 LINK
    • D.1.4 UNLINK
  • D.2 Additional Header Field Definitions
    • D.2.1 Accept
    • D.2.2 Accept-Charset
    • D.2.3 Accept-Encoding
    • D.2.4 Accept-Language
    • D.2.5 Content-Language
    • D.2.6 Link
    • D.2.7 MIME-Version
    • D.2.8 Retry-After
    • D.2.9 Title
    • D.2.10 URI

• Original text document
• Complete HTML RFC (TAR, TGZ, or ZIP format)