- 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
12.1 Server-driven Negotiation
If the selection of the best representation for a response is made by an algorithm located at the server, it is called server-driven negotiation. Selection is based on the available representations of the response (the dimensions over which it can vary; e.g. language, content-coding, etc.) and the contents of particular header fields in the request message or on other information pertaining to the request (such as the network address of the client).
Server-driven negotiation is advantageous when the algorithm for selecting from among the available representations is difficult to describe to the user agent, or when the server desires to send its "best guess" to the client along with the first response (hoping to avoid the round-trip delay of a subsequent request if the "best guess" is good enough for the user). In order to improve the server's guess, the user agent MAY include request header fields (Accept, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding, etc.) which describe its preferences for such a response.
Server-driven negotiation has disadvantages:
It is impossible for the server to accurately determine what might be "best" for any given user, since that would require complete knowledge of both the capabilities of the user agent and the intended use for the response (e.g., does the user want to view it on screen or print it on paper?).
Having the user agent describe its capabilities in every request can be both very inefficient (given that only a small percentage of responses have multiple representations) and a potential violation of the user's privacy.
It complicates the implementation of an origin server and the algorithms for generating responses to a request.
It may limit a public cache's ability to use the same response for multiple user's requests.
HTTP/1.1 includes the following request-header fields for enabling server-driven negotiation through description of user agent capabilities and user preferences: Accept (Section 14.1), Accept- Charset (Section 14.2), Accept-Encoding (Section 14.3), Accept- Language (Section 14.4), and User-Agent (Section 14.43). However, an origin server is not limited to these dimensions and MAY vary the response based on any aspect of the request, including information outside the request-header fields or within extension header fields not defined by this specification.
The Vary header field can be used to express the parameters the server uses to select a representation that is subject to server- driven negotiation. See Section 13.6 for use of the Vary header field by caches and Section 14.44 for use of the Vary header field by servers.