HTTP header | Quick definition | Agent |
Accept | media types handled by client | Client |
Accept-Charset | charsets understood by client | Client |
Accept-Encoding | encodings understood by client | Client |
Accept-Language | languages understood by client (or ideally by user) | Client |
Accept-Ranges | whether server understands range requests (and what type) | Server |
Age | how long the content has been cached | Cache |
Allow | methods supported for that URL | Server |
Authorization | HTTP authentication user name and password | Client |
Cache-Control | various sub-fields indicating if the file can be cached | Server |
Connection | To distinguish persistent and close-able connections | Client, Server |
Content-Encoding | Encodings used - for example gzip compression | Server |
Content-Language | Language of page | Server |
Content-Length | Size of what is being sent from server or POSTed by UA | Client, Server |
Content-Location | The "real" URL of a page | Server |
Content-MD5 | MD5 hash for integrity check of the entity-body | Client, Server |
Content-Range | What part of the document is being sent | Server |
Content-Type | What type of file is sent | Server |
Date | Current date | Server |
ETag | Short "signature" of that version of a file, can be used to check if it is updated | Server |
Expect | Client asks for specific server behaviour | Client |
Expires | how long the content may be cached | Server |
From | E-mail of user visiting site (anyone actually using this??) | Client |
Host | Domain name of server one is requesting page from | Client |
If-Match | If page still matches previously received ETag "signature" | Client |
If-Modified-Since | If page has been changed since a certain date | Client |
If-None-Match | If page does not match previously received ETag "signature" | Client |
If-Range | Request only part of a file if it isn't updated | Client |
If-Unmodified-Since | If page hasn't been changed since a certain date | Client |
Last-Modified | Date of last time the file was changed | Server |
Location | Send the request to another place | Server |
Max-Forwards | Limit the number of proxy servers that may process the request | Client |
Pragma | General "whatever" tag, like HTML's META | Client, Server, Cache |
Proxy-Authenticate | Request proxy user name and password | Proxy |
Proxy-Authorization | Send proxy user name and password | Client |
Range | Request only part of a file | Client |
Referer | URL of page with a link that took you to the current | Client |
Retry-After | Used with error messages to indicate when service may be available again | Server |
Server | Name of server software | Server |
TE | Acceptable transfer-codings | Client |
Trailer | Used with transfer-coding to show what HTTP headers are available in "trailer" of message | Server |
Transfer-Encoding | Type of transformation used between sender and recipient | Server |
Upgrade | Client indicates that it supports other protocols/versions than HTTP/1.1 | Client |
User-Agent | Name of UA software | Client |
Vary | For content-negotiation, shows criteria used for selecting that content | Server |
Via | Proxy servers note that they've been involved in transferring this content | Proxy |
Warning | Human- or proxy-readable message about the state of the contents | Server |
WWW-Authenticate | Request user name and password | Server |