Rfc2616 lists many methods besides GET and POST, like, say, DELETE, PUT etc. Method field in html forms, though, seems to be allowed to specify only GET or POST. Is it possible to create a link or...

I'm using the ETag header for caching and the browser sends a corresponding If-None-Match header. Initially, I simply compared these headers and it worked. Later it occurred to me that rfc2616 all...

I have a legacy product that I'm trying to support on an Apache server and the server only after a recent update began rejecting request headers which only used LF for newlines and it's a tall orde...

When comparing two URIs to decide if they match or not, a client SHOULD use a case-sensitive octet-by-octet comparison of the entire URIs, with these exceptions: I read above Sentence in Http Rfc...

I'm parsing HTTP headers. I want to split the header values into arrays where it makes sense. For example, Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store should return ['no-cache','no-store']. HTTP RFC2616 sa...

I'm parsing HTTP data directly from packets (either TCP reconstructed or not, you can assume it is). I'm looking for the best way to parse HTTP as accurately as possible. The main issue here is t...

The HTTP client built into Node.js doesn't seem to support pipelining requests. However, it occurred to me that it may be possible to create an Agent that sets up pipelining in the background. Ther...

I can't tell from RFC 2616 whether an HTTP client should accept a 204 No Content response that includes Content-Length: 0 or Transfer-Encoding: chunked headers. These headers seem to break some HTT...

I have a question on how does a HTTP Server response look like when a HEAD is sent to a resource and server decided to perform chunked encoding? If a Server always wishes to perform chunked encod...

What's the proper error code to return when a POST request has an invalid parameter? Say: a form takes data for an event, but the date provided is in the past; or a form takes data for a user regis...

I have two questions on HTTP Connection close: If a client sends a HTTP request with Connection: close to HTTP Server, Is it the HTTP Server or client responsibility to send TCP FIN after respons...

I have a question on usage of Content-Encoding and Transfer-Encoding: Please let me know if my below understanding is right: Client in its request can specify which encoding types it is willing t...

I'm having trouble to understand the use cases of the 204 HTTP status code. The RFC2616 says : 10.2.5 204 No Content The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an enti...

I'm looking at various methods of RESTfully versioning APIs, and there are three major contenders. I believe I've all but settled on using X-API-Version. Putting that debate aside, one of the argum...

What are the differences and advantages of using one over the other: Accept: application/json;charset=utf-8 versus: Accept: application/json Accept-Charset: utf-8 Is the first form compliant ...

If no charset parameter is specified in the Content-Type header, RFC2616 section 3.7.1 seems to imply ISO8859-1 should be assumed for media types of subtype "text": When no explicit char...

While writing my HTTP/1.1 server, I get stuck dealing multiple ranges request. Section 14.35.1 of RFC 2616 refers some examples but doesn't clarify server behaviour. For instance: GET /some/resou...

What should a http client do if server returned Cache-Control: private, public ? I have a feeling private should override public, but I can't find a confirmation in the RFC (other than MUST in pri...

Section 19.3 "Tolerant Applications" of the HTTP 1.1 RFC (2616) says on the subject of parsing dates from HTTP client applications: If an HTTP header incorrectly carries a date value with a time...

The w3.org (RFC2616) seems not to define a maximum size for chunks. But without a maximum chunk-size there is no space for the chunk-extension. There must be a maximum chunk-size, else I can't igno...

I have to implement an HTTP client in Java and for my needs it seems that the most efficient way to do it, is implement HTTP pipeline (as per RFC2616). As an aside, I want to pipeline POSTs. (Also...

This question is regarding the order of precedence for the media-types of the HTTP Header "Accept-Encoding" when all are of equal weight and has been prompted by this comment on my blog. Backgroun...