Network Working Group                                      R. Fielding
Request for Comments: 2068                                   UC Irvine
Category: Standards Track                                    J. Gettys
                                                              J. Mogul
                                                                   DEC
                                                            H. Frystyk
                                                        T. Berners-Lee
                                                               MIT/LCS
                                                          January 1997


                Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level
   protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information
   systems. It is a generic, stateless, object-oriented protocol which
   can be used for many tasks, such as name servers and distributed
   object management systems, through extension of its request methods.
   A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data
   representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the
   data being transferred.

   HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information
   initiative since 1990. This specification defines the protocol
   referred to as "HTTP/1.1".

Table of Contents

   1 Introduction.............................................7
    1.1 Purpose ..............................................7
    1.2 Requirements .........................................7
    1.3 Terminology ..........................................8
    1.4 Overall Operation ...................................11
   2 Notational Conventions and Generic Grammar..............13
    2.1 Augmented BNF .......................................13
    2.2 Basic Rules .........................................15
   3 Protocol Parameters.....................................17
    3.1 HTTP Version ........................................17




 
RFC 2068                        HTTP/1.1                    January 1997


    3.2 Uniform Resource Identifiers ........................18
     3.2.1 General Syntax ...................................18
     3.2.2 http URL .........................................19
     3.2.3 URI Comparison ...................................20
    3.3 Date/Time Formats ...................................21
     3.3.1 Full Date ........................................21
     3.3.2 Delta Seconds ....................................22
    3.4 Character Sets ......................................22
    3.5 Content Codings .....................................23
    3.6 Transfer Codings ....................................24
    3.7 Media Types .........................................25
     3.7.1 Canonicalization and Text Defaults ...............26
     3.7.2 Multipart Types ..................................27
    3.8 Product Tokens ......................................28
    3.9 Quality Values ......................................28
    3.10 Language Tags ......................................28
    3.11 Entity Tags ........................................29
    3.12 Range Units ........................................30
   4 HTTP Message............................................30
    4.1 Message Types .......................................30
    4.2 Message Headers .....................................31
    4.3 Message Body ........................................32
    4.4 Message Length ......................................32
    4.5 General Header Fields ...............................34
   5 Request.................................................34
    5.1 Request-Line ........................................34
     5.1.1 Method ...........................................35
     5.1.2 Request-URI ......................................35
    5.2 The Resource Identified by a Request ................37
    5.3 Request Header Fields ...............................37
   6 Response................................................38
    6.1 Status-Line .........................................38
     6.1.1 Status Code and Reason Phrase ....................39
    6.2 Response Header Fields ..............................41
   7 Entity..................................................41
    7.1 Entity Header Fields ................................41
    7.2 Entity Body .........................................42
     7.2.1 Type .............................................42