Network Working Group R. Fielding
Request for Comments: 2616 UC Irvine
Obsoletes: 2068 J. Gettys
Category: Standards Track Compaq/W3C
J. Mogul
Compaq
H. Frystyk
W3C/MIT
L. Masinter
Xerox
P. Leach
Microsoft
T. Berners-Lee
W3C/MIT
June 1999
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.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level
protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information
systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for
many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and
distributed object management systems, through extension of its
request methods, error codes and headers [47]. 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", and is an update to RFC 2068 [33].
Fielding, et al. Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 2616 HTTP/1.1 June 1999
Table of Contents
1 Introduction ...................................................7
1.1 Purpose......................................................7
1.2 Requirements .................................................8
1.3 Terminology ..................................................8
1.4 Overall Operation ...........................................12
2 Notational Conventions and Generic Grammar ....................14
2.1 Augmented BNF ...............................................14
2.2 Basic Rules .................................................15
3 Protocol Parameters ...........................................17
3.1 HTTP Version ................................................17
3.2 Uniform Resource Identifiers ................................18
3.2.1 General Syntax ...........................................19
3.2.2 http URL .................................................19
3.2.3 URI Comparison ...........................................20
3.3 Date/Time Formats ...........................................20
3.3.1 Full Date ................................................20
3.3.2 Delta Seconds ............................................21
3.4 Character Sets ..............................................21
3.4.1 Missing Charset ..........................................22
3.5 Content Codings .............................................23
3.6 Transfer Codings ............................................24
3.6.1 Chunked Transfer Coding ..................................25
3.7 Media Types .................................................26
3.7.1 Canonicalization and Text Defaults .......................27
3.7.2 Multipart Types ..........................................27
3.8 Product Tokens ..............................................28
3.9 Quality Values ..............................................29
3.10 Language Tags ...............................................29
3.11 Entity Tags .................................................30
3.12 Range Units .................................................30
4 HTTP Message ..................................................31
4.1 Message Types ...............................................31
datatracker.ietf.org