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:

• 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.

• 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:

• Connection
• Keep-Alive
• Public
• Proxy-Authenticate
• Transfer-Encoding
• 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.