- 1) Introduction
- 2) Notational Conventions and Generic Grammar
- 3) Protocol Parameters
- 4) HTTP Message
- 5) Request
- 6) Response
- 7) Entity
- 8) Connections
- 9) Method Definitions
- 10) Status Code Definitions
- 1) Informational 1xx
- 2) Successful 2xx
- 3) Redirection 3xx
- 4) Client Error 4xx
- 1) 400 Bad Request
- 2) 401 Unauthorized
- 3) 402 Payment Required
- 4) 403 Forbidden
- 5) 404 Not Found
- 6) 405 Method Not Allowed
- 7) 406 Not Acceptable
- 8) 407 Proxy Authentication Required
- 9) 408 Request Timeout
- 10) 409 Conflict
- 11) 410 Gone
- 12) 411 Length Required
- 13) 412 Precondition Failed
- 14) 413 Request Entity Too Large
- 15) 414 Request-URI Too Long
- 16) 415 Unsupported Media Type
- 17) 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
- 18) 417 Expectation Failed
- 5) Server Error 5xx
- 11) Access Authentication
- 12) Content Negotiation
- 13) Caching in HTTP
- 1) ..
- 2) Expiration Model
- 3) Validation Model
- 4) Response Cacheability
- 5) Constructing Responses From Caches
- 6) Caching Negotiated Responses
- 7) Shared and Non-Shared Caches
- 8) Errors or Incomplete Response Cache Behavior
- 9) Side Effects of GET and HEAD
- 10) Invalidation After Updates or Deletions
- 11) Write-Through Mandatory
- 12) Cache Replacement
- 13) History Lists
- 14) Header Field Definitions
- 1) Accept
- 2) Accept-Charset
- 3) Accept-Encoding
- 4) Accept-Language
- 5) Accept-Ranges
- 6) Age
- 7) Allow
- 8) Authorization
- 9) Cache-Control
- 10) Connection
- 11) Content-Encoding
- 12) Content-Language
- 13) Content-Length
- 14) Content-Location
- 15) Content-MD5
- 16) Content-Range
- 17) Content-Type
- 18) Date
- 19) ETag
- 20) Expect
- 21) Expires
- 22) From
- 23) Host
- 24) If-Match
- 25) If-Modified-Since
- 26) If-None-Match
- 27) If-Range
- 28) If-Unmodified-Since
- 29) Last-Modified
- 30) Location
- 31) Max-Forwards
- 32) Pragma
- 33) Proxy-Authenticate
- 34) Proxy-Authorization
- 35) Range
- 36) Referer
- 37) Retry-After
- 38) Server
- 39) TE
- 40) Trailer
- 41) Transfer-Encoding
- 42) Upgrade
- 43) User-Agent
- 44) Vary
- 45) Via
- 46) Warning
- 47) WWW-Authenticate
- 15) Security Considerations
- 16) Acknowledgments
- 17) References
- 18) Authors' Addresses
- 19) Appendices
- 20) Index
- 21) Full Copyright Statement
- 22) Acknowledgement
3.11 Entity Tags
Entity tags are used for comparing two or more entities from the same requested resource. HTTP/1.1 uses entity tags in the ETag (Section 14.19), If-Match (Section 14.24), If-None-Match (Section 14.26), and If-Range (Section 14.27) header fields. The definition of how they are used and compared as cache validators is in Section 13.3.3. An entity tag consists of an opaque quoted string, possibly prefixed by a weakness indicator.
entity-tag | = [ weak ] opaque-tag |
weak | = "W/" |
opaque-tag | = quoted-strin |
A "strong entity tag" MAY be shared by two entities of a resource only if they are equivalent by octet equality.
A "weak entity tag," indicated by the "W/" prefix, MAY be shared by two entities of a resource only if the entities are equivalent and could be substituted for each other with no significant change in semantics. A weak entity tag can only be used for weak comparison.
An entity tag MUST be unique across all versions of all entities associated with a particular resource. A given entity tag value MAY be used for entities obtained by requests on different URIs. The use of the same entity tag value in conjunction with entities obtained by requests on different URIs does not imply the equivalence of those entities.