HTTP/1.1, part 4: Conditional RequestsAdobe Systems Incorporated345 Park AveSan JoseCA95110USAfielding@gbiv.comhttp://roy.gbiv.com/Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs21 Oak Knoll RoadCarlisleMA01741USAjg@freedesktop.orghttp://gettys.wordpress.com/Hewlett-Packard CompanyHP Labs, Large Scale Systems Group1501 Page Mill Road, MS 1177Palo AltoCA94304USAJeffMogul@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporation1 Microsoft WayRedmondWA98052USAhenrikn@microsoft.comAdobe Systems Incorporated345 Park AveSan JoseCA95110USALMM@acm.orghttp://larry.masinter.net/Microsoft Corporation1 Microsoft WayRedmondWA98052paulle@microsoft.comWorld Wide Web ConsortiumMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryThe Stata Center, Building 3232 Vassar StreetCambridgeMA02139USAtimbl@w3.orghttp://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/World Wide Web ConsortiumW3C / ERCIM2004, rte des LuciolesSophia-AntipolisAM06902Franceylafon@w3.orghttp://www.raubacapeu.net/people/yves/greenbytes GmbHHafenweg 16MuensterNW48155Germany+49 251 2807760+49 251 2807761julian.reschke@greenbytes.dehttp://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/HTTPbis Working Group
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for
distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems. HTTP has been in
use by the World Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This
document is Part 4 of the seven-part specification that defines the protocol
referred to as "HTTP/1.1" and, taken together, obsoletes RFC 2616.
Part 4 defines request header fields for indicating conditional requests and
the rules for constructing responses to those requests.
Discussion of this draft should take place on the HTTPBIS working group
mailing list (ietf-http-wg@w3.org), which is archived at
.
The current issues list is at
and related
documents (including fancy diffs) can be found at
.
The changes in this draft are summarized in .
This document defines the HTTP/1.1 conditional request mechanisms,
including both metadata for indicating/observing changes in resource
representations and request header fields that specify preconditions
on that metadata be checked before performing the request method.
Conditional GET requests are the most efficient mechanism for HTTP
cache updates . Conditionals can also be
applied to state-changing methods, such as PUT and DELETE, to prevent
the "lost update" problem: one client accidentally overwriting
the work of another client that has been acting in parallel.
Conditional request preconditions are based on the state of the target
resource as a whole (its current value set) or the state as observed
in a previously obtained representation (one value in that set).
A resource might have multiple current representations, each with its
own observable state. The conditional request mechanisms assume that
the mapping of requests to corresponding representations will be
consistent over time if the server intends to take advantage of
conditionals. Regardless, if the mapping is inconsistent and
the server is unable to select the appropriate representation, then
no harm will result when the precondition evaluates to false.
We use the term "selected representation" to refer to
the current representation of the target resource that would have been
selected in a successful response if the same request had used the method
GET and had excluded all of the conditional request header fields.
The conditional request preconditions are evaluated by comparing the
values provided in the request header fields to the current metadata
for the selected representation.
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 .
This document defines conformance criteria for several roles in HTTP
communication, including Senders, Recipients, Clients, Servers, User-Agents,
Origin Servers, Intermediaries, Proxies and Gateways. See Section 2 of
for definitions of these terms.
An implementation is considered conformant if it complies with all of the
requirements associated with its role(s). Note that SHOULD-level requirements
are relevant here, unless one of the documented exceptions is applicable.
This document also uses ABNF to define valid protocol elements
(). In addition to the prose requirements placed
upon them, Senders MUST NOT generate protocol elements that are invalid.
Unless noted otherwise, Recipients MAY take steps to recover a usable
protocol element from an invalid construct. However, HTTP does not define
specific error handling mechanisms, except in cases where it has direct
impact on security. This is because different uses of the protocol require
different error handling strategies; for example, a Web browser may wish to
transparently recover from a response where the Location header field
doesn't parse according to the ABNF, whereby in a systems control protocol
using HTTP, this type of error recovery could lead to dangerous consequences.
This specification uses the ABNF syntax defined in Section 1.2 of (which
extends the syntax defined in with a list rule).
shows the collected ABNF, with the list
rule expanded.
The following core rules are included by
reference, as defined in , 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), and
VCHAR (any visible US-ASCII character).
The ABNF rules below are defined in and
:
This specification defines two forms of metadata that are commonly used
to observe resource state and test for preconditions: modification dates
and opaque entity tags. Additional metadata that reflects resource state
has been defined by various extensions of HTTP, such as WebDAV
, that are beyond the scope of this specification.
A resource metadata value is referred to as a "validator"
when it is used within a precondition.
Validators come in two flavors: strong or weak. Weak validators are easy
to generate but are far less useful for comparisons. Strong validators
are ideal for comparisons but can be very difficult (and occasionally
impossible) to generate efficiently. Rather than impose that all forms
of resource adhere to the same strength of validator, HTTP exposes the
type of validator in use and imposes restrictions on when weak validators
can be used as preconditions.
A "strong validator" is a representation metadata value that MUST be
changed to a new, previously unused or guaranteed unique, value whenever
a change occurs to the representation data such that a change would be
observable in the payload body of a 200 response to GET. A strong
validator MAY be changed for other reasons, such as when a semantically
significant part of the representation metadata is changed (e.g.,
Content-Type), but it is in the best interests of the origin server to only
change the value when it is necessary to invalidate the stored responses
held by remote caches and authoring tools. A strong validator MUST be
unique across all representations of a given resource, such that no two
representations of that resource share the same validator unless
their payload body would be identical.
Cache entries might persist for arbitrarily long periods, regardless
of expiration times. Thus, a cache might attempt to validate an
entry using a validator that it obtained in the distant past.
A strong validator MUST be unique across all versions of all
representations associated with a particular resource over time.
However, there is no implication of uniqueness across representations
of different resources (i.e., the same strong validator might be
in use for representations of multiple resources at the same time
and does not imply that those representations are equivalent).
There are a variety of strong validators used in practice. The best are
based on strict revision control, wherein each change to a representation
always results in a unique node name and revision identifier being assigned
before the representation is made accessible to GET. A cryptographic hash
function applied to the representation data is also sufficient if the data
is available prior to the response header fields being sent and the digest
does not need to be recalculated every time a validation request is
received. However, if a resource has distinct representations that differ
only in their metadata, such as might occur with content negotiation over
media types that happen to share the same data format, then a server
SHOULD incorporate additional information in the validator to
distinguish those representations and avoid confusing cache behavior.
In contrast, a "weak validator" is a representation metadata value that
might not be changed for every change to the representation data. This
weakness might be due to limitations in how the value is calculated, such
as clock resolution or an inability to ensure uniqueness for all possible
representations of the resource, or due to a desire by the resource owner
to group representations by some self-determined set of equivalency
rather than unique sequences of data. A weak entity-tag SHOULD change
whenever the origin server considers prior representations to be
unacceptable as a substitute for the current representation. In other
words, a weak entity-tag SHOULD change whenever the origin server wants
caches to invalidate old responses.
For example, the representation of a weather report that changes in
content every second, based on dynamic measurements, might be grouped
into sets of equivalent representations (from the origin server's
perspective) with the same weak validator in order to allow cached
representations to be valid for a reasonable period of time (perhaps
adjusted dynamically based on server load or weather quality).
Likewise, a representation's modification time, if defined with only
one-second resolution, might be a weak validator if it is possible
for the representation to be modified twice during a single second and
retrieved between those modifications.
A "use" of a validator occurs when either a client generates a request
and includes the validator in a precondition or when a server
compares two validators.
Weak validators are only usable in contexts that do not depend on exact
equality of a representation's payload body.
Strong validators are usable and preferred for all conditional requests,
including cache validation, partial content ranges, and "lost update"
avoidance.
The "Last-Modified" header field indicates the date and time at
which the origin server believes the selected representation was
last modified.
An example of its use is
Origin servers SHOULD send Last-Modified for any selected
representation for which a last modification date can be reasonably
and consistently determined, since its use in conditional requests
and evaluating cache freshness () results in a substantial
reduction of HTTP traffic on the Internet and can be a significant
factor in improving service scalability and reliability.
A representation is typically the sum of many parts behind the
resource interface. The last-modified time would usually be
the most recent time that any of those parts were changed.
How that value is determined for any given resource is an
implementation detail beyond the scope of this specification.
What matters to HTTP is how recipients of the Last-Modified
header field can use its value to make conditional requests
and test the validity of locally cached responses.
An origin server SHOULD obtain the Last-Modified value of the
representation as close as possible to the time that it generates
the Date field-value for its response. This allows a recipient to
make an accurate assessment of the representation's modification time,
especially if the representation changes near the time that the
response is generated.
An origin server with a clock MUST NOT send a Last-Modified date
that is later than the server's time of message origination (Date).
If the last modification time is derived from implementation-specific
metadata that evaluates to some time in the future, according to the
origin server's clock, then the origin server MUST replace that
value with the message origination date. This prevents a future
modification date from having an adverse impact on cache validation.
An origin server without a clock MUST NOT assign Last-Modified
values to a response unless these values were associated
with the resource by some other system or user with a reliable clock.
A Last-Modified time, when used as a validator in a request, is
implicitly weak unless it is possible to deduce that it is strong,
using the following rules:
The validator is being compared by an origin server to the
actual current validator for the representation and,That origin server reliably knows that the associated representation did
not change twice during the second covered by the presented
validator.
or
The validator is about to be used by a client in an If-Modified-Since,
If-Unmodified-Since header field, because the client has a cache entry,
or If-Range for the associated representation, andThat cache entry includes a Date value, which gives the time
when the origin server sent the original response, andThe presented Last-Modified time is at least 60 seconds before
the Date value.
or
The validator is being compared by an intermediate cache to the
validator stored in its cache entry for the representation, andThat cache entry includes a Date value, which gives the time
when the origin server sent the original response, andThe presented Last-Modified time is at least 60 seconds before
the Date value.
This method relies on the fact that if two different responses were
sent by the origin server during the same second, but both had the
same Last-Modified time, then at least one of those responses would
have a Date value equal to its Last-Modified time. The arbitrary 60-second
limit guards against the possibility that the Date and Last-Modified
values are generated from different clocks, or at somewhat
different times during the preparation of the response. An
implementation MAY use a value larger than 60 seconds, if it is
believed that 60 seconds is too short.
The ETag header field provides the current entity-tag for the
selected representation.
An entity-tag is an opaque validator for differentiating between
multiple representations of the same resource, regardless of whether
those multiple representations are due to resource state changes over
time, content negotiation resulting in multiple representations being
valid at the same time, or both. An entity-tag consists of an opaque
quoted string, possibly prefixed by a weakness indicator.
Note: Previously, opaque-tag was defined to be a quoted-string
(, Section 3.11), thus some recipients
might perform backslash unescaping. Servers therefore ought to avoid
backslash characters in entity tags.
An entity-tag can be more reliable for validation than a modification
date in situations where it is inconvenient to store modification
dates, where the one-second resolution of HTTP date values is not
sufficient, or where modification dates are not consistently maintained.
An entity-tag can be either a weak or strong validator, with
strong being the default. If an origin server provides an entity-tag
for a representation and the generation of that entity-tag does not satisfy
the requirements for a strong validator
(), then that
entity-tag MUST be marked as weak by prefixing its opaque value
with "W/" (case-sensitive).
The principle behind entity-tags is that only the service author
knows the implementation of a resource well enough to select the
most accurate and efficient validation mechanism for that resource,
and that any such mechanism can be mapped to a simple sequence of
octets for easy comparison. Since the value is opaque, there is no
need for the client to be aware of how each entity-tag is constructed.
For example, a resource that has implementation-specific versioning
applied to all changes might use an internal revision number, perhaps
combined with a variance identifier for content negotiation, to
accurately differentiate between representations.
Other implementations might use a stored hash of representation content,
a combination of various filesystem attributes, or a modification
timestamp that has sub-second resolution.
Origin servers SHOULD send ETag for any selected representation
for which detection of changes can be reasonably and consistently
determined, since the entity-tag's use in conditional requests and
evaluating cache freshness () can result in a substantial
reduction of HTTP network traffic and can be a significant factor in
improving service scalability and reliability.
There are two entity-tag comparison functions, depending
on whether the comparison context allows the use of weak validators
or not:
The strong comparison function: in order to be considered equal,
both opaque-tags MUST be identical character-by-character, and both
MUST NOT be weak.The weak comparison function: in order to be considered equal, both
opaque-tags MUST be identical character-by-character, but
either or both of them MAY be tagged as "weak" without affecting
the result.
The example below shows the results for a set of entity-tag pairs,
and both the weak and strong comparison function results:
ETag 1ETag 2Strong ComparisonWeak ComparisonW/"1"W/"1"no matchmatchW/"1"W/"2"no matchno matchW/"1""1"no matchmatch"1""1"matchmatch
Consider a resource that is subject to content negotiation (Section 5 of ),
and where the representations returned upon a GET request vary based on
the Accept-Encoding request header field (Section 6.3 of ):
In this case, the response might or might not use the gzip content coding.
If it does not, the response might look like:
An alternative representation that does use gzip content coding would be:
Note: Content codings are a property of the representation,
so therefore an entity-tag of an encoded representation must be distinct
from an unencoded representation to prevent conflicts during cache updates
and range requests. In contrast, transfer codings (Section 5.1 of )
apply only during message transfer and do not require distinct entity-tags.
We adopt a set of rules and recommendations for origin servers,
clients, and caches regarding when various validator types ought to
be used, and for what purposes.
HTTP/1.1 origin servers:
SHOULD send an entity-tag validator unless it is not feasible to
generate one.MAY send a weak entity-tag instead of a strong entity-tag, if
performance considerations support the use of weak entity-tags,
or if it is unfeasible to send a strong entity-tag.SHOULD send a Last-Modified value if it is feasible to send one.
In other words, the preferred behavior for an HTTP/1.1 origin server
is to send both a strong entity-tag and a Last-Modified value.
HTTP/1.1 clients:
MUST use that entity-tag in any cache-conditional request (using
If-Match or If-None-Match) if an entity-tag has been provided by the
origin server.SHOULD use the Last-Modified value in non-subrange cache-conditional
requests (using If-Modified-Since) if only a Last-Modified value has
been provided by the origin server. MAY use the Last-Modified value in subrange cache-conditional
requests (using If-Unmodified-Since) if only a Last-Modified value has
been provided by an HTTP/1.0 origin server. The user agent SHOULD
provide a way to disable this, in case of difficulty.SHOULD use both validators in cache-conditional requests if both an
entity-tag and a Last-Modified value have been provided by the origin
server. This allows both HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 caches to respond
appropriately.
An HTTP/1.1 origin server, upon receiving a conditional request that
includes both a Last-Modified date (e.g., in an If-Modified-Since or
If-Unmodified-Since header field) and one or more entity-tags (e.g.,
in an If-Match, If-None-Match, or If-Range header field) as cache
validators, MUST NOT return a response status code of 304 (Not Modified)
unless doing so is consistent with all of the conditional header
fields in the request.
An HTTP/1.1 caching proxy, upon receiving a conditional request that
includes both a Last-Modified date and one or more entity-tags as
cache validators, MUST NOT return a locally cached response to the
client unless that cached response is consistent with all of the
conditional header fields in the request.
Note: The general principle behind these rules is that HTTP/1.1
servers and clients ought to transmit as much non-redundant
information as is available in their responses and requests.
HTTP/1.1 systems receiving this information will make the most
conservative assumptions about the validators they receive.
HTTP/1.0 clients and caches might ignore entity-tags. Generally,
last-modified values received or used by these systems will
support transparent and efficient caching, and so HTTP/1.1 origin
servers should provide Last-Modified values. In those rare cases
where the use of a Last-Modified value as a validator by an
HTTP/1.0 system could result in a serious problem, then HTTP/1.1
origin servers should not provide one.
This section defines the syntax and semantics of HTTP/1.1 header fields
for applying preconditions on requests.
The "If-Match" header field MAY be used to make a request method
conditional on the current existence or value of an entity-tag for
one or more representations of the target resource. If-Match is
generally useful for resource update requests, such as PUT requests,
as a means for protecting against accidental overwrites when multiple
clients are acting in parallel on the same resource (i.e., the
"lost update" problem). An If-Match field-value of "*" places the
precondition on the existence of any current representation for the
target resource.
If any of the entity-tags listed in the If-Match field value match
(as per ) the entity-tag of the
selected representation for the target resource,
or if "*" is given and any current representation exists for the
target resource, then the server MAY perform the request method
as if the If-Match header field was not present.
If none of the entity-tags match, or if "*" is given and no current
representation exists, the server MUST NOT perform the requested method.
Instead, the server MUST respond with the 412 (Precondition Failed)
status code.
If the request would, without the If-Match header field, result in
anything other than a 2xx or 412 status code, then the If-Match header field
MUST be ignored.
Examples:
The result of a request having both an If-Match header field and
either an If-None-Match or an If-Modified-Since header fields is
undefined by this specification.
The "If-None-Match" header field MAY be used to make a request method
conditional on not matching any of the current entity-tag values for
representations of the target resource. If-None-Match is primarily
used in conditional GET requests to enable efficient updates of cached
information with a minimum amount of transaction overhead. A client
that has one or more representations previously obtained from the
target resource can send If-None-Match with a list of the associated
entity-tags in the hope of receiving a 304 response if at least one
of those representations matches the selected representation.
If-None-Match MAY also be used with a value of "*" to prevent an unsafe
request method (e.g., PUT) from inadvertently modifying an existing
representation of the target resource when the client believes that
the resource does not have a current representation. This is a variation
on the "lost update" problem that might arise if more than one client
attempts to create an initial representation for the target resource.
If any of the entity-tags listed in the If-None-Match field-value match
(as per ) the entity-tag of the
selected representation, or if "*" is
given and any current representation exists for that resource, then the
server MUST NOT perform the requested method.
Instead, if the request method was GET or HEAD, the server SHOULD
respond with a 304 (Not Modified) status code, including the cache-related
header fields (particularly ETag) of the selected representation that has
a matching entity-tag. For all other request methods, the server MUST
respond with a 412 (Precondition Failed) status code.
If none of the entity-tags match, then the server MAY perform the
requested method as if the If-None-Match header field did not exist,
but MUST also ignore any If-Modified-Since header field(s) in the
request. That is, if no entity-tags match, then the server MUST NOT
return a 304 (Not Modified) response.
If the request would, without the If-None-Match header field, result
in anything other than a 2xx or 304 status code, then the If-None-Match
header field MUST be ignored. (See for
a discussion of server behavior when both If-Modified-Since and
If-None-Match appear in the same request.)
Examples:
The result of a request having both an If-None-Match header field and
either an If-Match or an If-Unmodified-Since header fields is
undefined by this specification.
The "If-Modified-Since" header field MAY be used to make a request
method conditional by modification date: if the selected representation
has not been modified since the time specified in this field, then
do not perform the request method; instead, respond as detailed below.
An example of the field is:
A GET method with an If-Modified-Since header field and no Range header
field requests that the selected representation be transferred only if
it has been modified since the date given by the If-Modified-Since
header field.
The algorithm for determining this includes the following cases:
If the request would normally result in anything other than a
200 (OK) status code, or if the passed If-Modified-Since date is
invalid, the response is exactly the same as for a normal GET.
A date which is later than the server's current time is
invalid.If the selected representation has been modified since the
If-Modified-Since date, the response is exactly the same as for
a normal GET.If the selected representation has not been modified since a valid
If-Modified-Since date, the server SHOULD return a
304 (Not Modified) response.
The purpose of this feature is to allow efficient updates of cached
information with a minimum amount of transaction overhead.
Note: The Range header field modifies the meaning of If-Modified-Since;
see Section 5.4 of for full details.
Note: If-Modified-Since times are interpreted by the server, whose
clock might not be synchronized with the client.
Note: When handling an If-Modified-Since header field, some
servers will use an exact date comparison function, rather than a
less-than function, for deciding whether to send a 304 (Not
Modified) response. To get best results when sending an If-Modified-Since
header field for cache validation, clients are
advised to use the exact date string received in a previous Last-Modified
header field whenever possible.
Note: If a client uses an arbitrary date in the If-Modified-Since
header field instead of a date taken from the Last-Modified header field for
the same request, the client needs to be aware that this
date is interpreted in the server's understanding of time.
Unsynchronized clocks and rounding problems, due to the different
encodings of time between the client and server, are concerns.
This includes the possibility of race conditions if the
document has changed between the time it was first requested and
the If-Modified-Since date of a subsequent request, and the
possibility of clock-skew-related problems if the If-Modified-Since
date is derived from the client's clock without correction
to the server's clock. Corrections for different time bases
between client and server are at best approximate due to network
latency.
The result of a request having both an If-Modified-Since header field
and either an If-Match or an If-Unmodified-Since header fields is
undefined by this specification.
The "If-Unmodified-Since" header field MAY be used to make a request
method conditional by modification date: if the selected representation
has been modified since the time specified in this field, then the
server MUST NOT perform the requested operation and MUST instead
respond with the 412 (Precondition Failed) status code.
If the selected representation has not been modified since the time
specified in this field, the server SHOULD perform the request
method as if the If-Unmodified-Since header field were not present.
An example of the field is:
If the request normally (i.e., without the If-Unmodified-Since
header field) would result in anything other than a 2xx or 412 status code,
the If-Unmodified-Since header field SHOULD be ignored.
If the specified date is invalid, the header field MUST be ignored.
The result of a request having both an If-Unmodified-Since header
field and either an If-None-Match or an If-Modified-Since header
fields is undefined by this specification.
The If-Range header field provides a special conditional request
mechanism that is similar to If-Match and If-Unmodified-Since but
specific to HTTP range requests. If-Range is defined in Section 5.3 of .
The 304 status code indicates that a conditional GET request has been
received and would have resulted in a 200 (OK) response if it were not
for the fact that the condition has evaluated to false. In other words,
there is no need for the server to transfer a representation of the
target resource because the client's request indicates that it already
has a valid representation, as indicated by the 304 response header
fields, and is therefore redirecting the client to make use of that
stored representation as if it were the payload of a 200 response.
The 304 response MUST NOT contain a message-body, and thus is always
terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.
A 304 response MUST include a Date header field (Section 9.2 of )
unless the origin server does not have a clock that can provide a
reasonable approximation of the current time. If a 200 response
to the same request would have included any of the header fields
Cache-Control, Content-Location, ETag, Expires, Last-Modified, or
Vary, then those same header fields MUST be sent in a 304 response.
Since the goal of a 304 response is to minimize information transfer
when the recipient already has one or more cached representations,
the response SHOULD NOT include representation metadata other
than the above listed fields unless said metadata exists for the
purpose of guiding cache updates (e.g., future HTTP extensions).
If the recipient of a 304 response does not have a cached representation
corresponding to the entity-tag indicated by the 304 response, then the
recipient MUST NOT use the 304 to update its own cache. If this
conditional request originated with an outbound client, such as a
user agent with its own cache sending a conditional GET to a shared
proxy, then the 304 response MAY be forwarded to the outbound client.
Otherwise, the recipient MUST disregard the 304 response and repeat
the request without any preconditions.
If a cache uses a received 304 response to update a cache entry, the
cache MUST update the entry to reflect any new field values given in
the response.
The 412 status code indicates that one or more preconditions given in
the request header fields evaluated to false when tested on the server.
This response code allows the client to place preconditions on the
current resource state (its current representations and metadata)
and thus prevent the request method from being applied if the target
resource is in an unexpected state.
The HTTP Status Code Registry located at
shall be updated with the registrations below:
ValueDescriptionReference304Not Modified412Precondition Failed
The Message Header Field Registry located at shall be updated
with the permanent registrations below (see ):
Header Field NameProtocolStatusReferenceETaghttpstandardIf-MatchhttpstandardIf-Modified-SincehttpstandardIf-None-MatchhttpstandardIf-Unmodified-SincehttpstandardLast-Modifiedhttpstandard
The change controller is: "IETF (iesg@ietf.org) - Internet Engineering Task Force".
No additional security considerations have been identified beyond
those applicable to HTTP in general .
See Section 11 of .
HTTP/1.1, part 1: URIs, Connections, and Message ParsingAdobe Systems Incorporatedfielding@gbiv.comAlcatel-Lucent Bell Labsjg@freedesktop.orgHewlett-Packard CompanyJeffMogul@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationhenrikn@microsoft.comAdobe Systems IncorporatedLMM@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationpaulle@microsoft.comWorld Wide Web Consortiumtimbl@w3.orgWorld Wide Web Consortiumylafon@w3.orggreenbytes GmbHjulian.reschke@greenbytes.deHTTP/1.1, part 2: Message SemanticsAdobe Systems Incorporatedfielding@gbiv.comAlcatel-Lucent Bell Labsjg@freedesktop.orgHewlett-Packard CompanyJeffMogul@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationhenrikn@microsoft.comAdobe Systems IncorporatedLMM@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationpaulle@microsoft.comWorld Wide Web Consortiumtimbl@w3.orgWorld Wide Web Consortiumylafon@w3.orggreenbytes GmbHjulian.reschke@greenbytes.deHTTP/1.1, part 3: Message Payload and Content NegotiationAdobe Systems Incorporatedfielding@gbiv.comAlcatel-Lucent Bell Labsjg@freedesktop.orgHewlett-Packard CompanyJeffMogul@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationhenrikn@microsoft.comAdobe Systems IncorporatedLMM@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationpaulle@microsoft.comWorld Wide Web Consortiumtimbl@w3.orgWorld Wide Web Consortiumylafon@w3.orggreenbytes GmbHjulian.reschke@greenbytes.deHTTP/1.1, part 5: Range Requests and Partial ResponsesAdobe Systems Incorporatedfielding@gbiv.comAlcatel-Lucent Bell Labsjg@freedesktop.orgHewlett-Packard CompanyJeffMogul@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationhenrikn@microsoft.comAdobe Systems IncorporatedLMM@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationpaulle@microsoft.comWorld Wide Web Consortiumtimbl@w3.orgWorld Wide Web Consortiumylafon@w3.orggreenbytes GmbHjulian.reschke@greenbytes.deHTTP/1.1, part 6: CachingAdobe Systems Incorporatedfielding@gbiv.comAlcatel-Lucent Bell Labsjg@freedesktop.orgHewlett-Packard CompanyJeffMogul@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationhenrikn@microsoft.comAdobe Systems IncorporatedLMM@acm.orgMicrosoft Corporationpaulle@microsoft.comWorld Wide Web Consortiumtimbl@w3.orgWorld Wide Web Consortiumylafon@w3.orgRackspacemnot@mnot.netgreenbytes GmbHjulian.reschke@greenbytes.deKey words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement LevelsHarvard Universitysob@harvard.eduAugmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNFBrandenburg InternetWorkingdcrocker@bbiw.netTHUS plc.paul.overell@thus.netHypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1University of California, Irvinefielding@ics.uci.eduW3Cjg@w3.orgCompaq Computer Corporationmogul@wrl.dec.comMIT Laboratory for Computer Sciencefrystyk@w3.orgXerox Corporationmasinter@parc.xerox.comMicrosoft Corporationpaulle@microsoft.comW3Ctimbl@w3.orgRegistration Procedures for Message Header FieldsNine by NineGK-IETF@ninebynine.orgBEA Systemsmnot@pobox.comHP LabsJeffMogul@acm.orgHTTP Extensions for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)CommerceNetldusseault@commerce.net
Allow weak entity-tags in all requests except range requests (Sections
and
).
Change ETag header field ABNF not to use quoted-string, thus avoiding
escaping issues.
()
Change ABNF productions for header fields to only define the field value.
()
Extracted relevant partitions from .
Closed issues:
:
"Normative and Informative references"
Other changes:
Move definitions of 304 and 412 condition codes from Part2.
Ongoing work on ABNF conversion ():
Add explicit references to BNF syntax and rules imported from other parts of the specification.
Closed issues:
:
"Weak ETags on non-GET requests"
Ongoing work on IANA Message Header Field Registration ():
Reference RFC 3984, and update header field registrations for header fields defined
in this document.
Closed issues:
:
"Examples for ETag matching"
:
"'entity value' undefined"
:
"bogus 2068 Date header reference"
Ongoing work on ABNF conversion ():
Use "/" instead of "|" for alternatives.
Introduce new ABNF rules for "bad" whitespace ("BWS"), optional
whitespace ("OWS") and required whitespace ("RWS").
Rewrite ABNFs to spell out whitespace rules, factor out
header field value format definitions.
Final work on ABNF conversion ():
Add appendix containing collected and expanded ABNF, reorganize ABNF introduction.
Closed issues:
:
"case-sensitivity of etag weakness indicator"
Closed issues:
:
"Weak ETags on non-GET requests" (If-Match still was defined to require
strong matching)
:
"move IANA registrations for optional status codes"
No significant changes.
No significant changes.
Closed issues:
:
"Clarify 'Requested Variant'"
:
"Clarify entity / representation / variant terminology"
:
"consider removing the 'changes from 2068' sections"
None.
Closed issues:
:
"Header Classification"
Closed issues:
:
"If-* and entities"
:
"Definition of validator weakness"
:
"untangle ABNFs for header fields"
:
"ETags and Quotes"
None.
Closed issues:
:
"If-Range should be listed when dicussing contexts where L-M can be considered strong"
Closed issues:
:
"Document HTTP's error-handling philosophy"
Closed issues:
:
"does etag value really use quoted-string"