- From: Jeff de la Beaujardiere <delabeau@iniki.gsfc.nasa.gov>
- Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 16:44:27 -0400
- To: walter@natural-innovations.com
- CC: www-html@w3.org
Walter Ian Kaye writes:
> Is there a standard way to check the existence of a URL resource without
> actually downloading it?
You can use the HEAD request instead of GET:
>telnet www.natural-innovations.com 80 #telnet to port 80
Trying 209.24.40.77...
Connected to www.natural-innovations.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0 #syntax is "Method Request-URI HTTP-Version"
#extra newline to signal end of request
HTTP/1.0 200 OK #response from server starts here
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 20:33:17 GMT
Server: BESTWWWD/1.0
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html
Connection closed by foreign host.
> Hmm, that brings up another question: How does one find out what
> commands are supported by different web servers?
The HTTP 1.0 request methods are GET, POST, and HEAD (see
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/rfc1945/rfc1945). HTTP 1.1 defines
OPTIONS, GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE (see
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/rfc2068/rfc2068).
--Jeff
= J-F Pitot de La Beaujardiere
= delabeau@iniki.gsfc.nasa.gov
= http://globe2.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Received on Monday, 12 May 1997 16:44:31 UTC