Re: Defining the meaning of headers associated with a request body

Thanks for the replies so far .. lots of very interesting information in 
there.

My original question remains, however, so I'm wondering if I'm just 
missing something about the nature of HTTP headers...

Allow me to cut right down to the essentials of my question:

  POST /z HTTP/1.1
  Cache-Control: max-age=3600
  Etag: "1"
  Content-Location: http://foo.com/y

My question is: /what do those three headers mean/ ??

If they mean 'nothing', does that allow me to correctly set up an agreed 
protocol wherein they mean 'associated with the POSTed body/entity'?

 From combinations of RFC2616 and Bis, I get that:

  - Cache-Control is/was a 'general header', although registered 
alongside the 'entity header', Expires, in p6.
  - Etag is a 'response header', although registered alongside the 
'entity header', Last-Modified, in p4.
  - Content-Location is/was an 'entity header'.

(The phrases 'entity' and 'general' appear to be dropped since ticket 224.)

Perhaps there would be value in constructing a single table with all the 
headers, what category they are (request, response, other??), what they 
mean in requests (GET/P*), what in responses?

Saying 'in this context, this header means nothing as far as Bis is 
concerned, so use it as you like' would be quite valuable information in 
general, where it holds true.

Cheers!

Duncan

Received on Friday, 20 January 2012 09:37:24 UTC