Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R.

Fielding, Editor
Request for Comments: 9112 Adobe
Obsoletes: 7230 M. Nottingham, Editor
STD: 99 Fastly
Category: Standards Track J. Reschke, Editor
ISSN: 2070-1721 greenbytes
June 2022

HTTP/1.1

Abstract
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless
application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative,
hypertext information systems. This document specifies the
HTTP/1.1 message syntax, message parsing, connection
management, and related security concerns.

This document obsoletes portions of RFC 7230.

Status of This Memo INTERNET STANDARD

This is an Internet Standards Track This document has
document. errata.

This document is a product of the Internet

Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF
community. It has received public review and has been approved for
publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further
information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841.

Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and
how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at https://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfc9112.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document
authors. All rights reserved.

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2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material
may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of
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Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside
the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC
or to translate it into languages other than English.

1. Introduction
1.1. Requirements Notation
1.2. Syntax Notation
2. Message
2.1. Message Format
2.2. Message Parsing
2.3. HTTP Version
3. Request Line
3.1. Method
3.2. Request Target
3.2.1. origin-form
3.2.2. absolute-form
3.2.3. authority-form
3.2.4. asterisk-form
3.3. Reconstructing the Target URI
4. Status Line
5. Field Syntax
5.1. Field Line Parsing
5.2. Obsolete Line Folding
6. Message Body
6.1. Transfer-Encoding
6.2. Content-Length
6.3. Message Body Length
7. Transfer Codings
7.1. Chunked Transfer Coding
7.1.1. Chunk Extensions
7.1.2. Chunked Trailer Section
7.1.3. Decoding Chunked
7.2. Transfer Codings for Compression
7.3. Transfer Coding Registry
7.4. Negotiating Transfer Codings
8. Handling Incomplete Messages
9. Connection Management
9.1. Establishment
9.2. Associating a Response to a Request
9.3. Persistence
9.3.1. Retrying Requests
9.3.2. Pipelining
9.4. Concurrency
9.5. Failures and Timeouts
9.6. Tear-down
9.7. TLS Connection Initiation
9.8. TLS Connection Closure
10. Enclosing Messages as Data
10.1. Media Type message/http
10.2. Media Type application/http
11. Security Considerations
11.1. Response Splitting
11.2. Request Smuggling
11.3. Message Integrity
11.4. Message Confidentiality
12. IANA Considerations
12.1. Field Name Registration
12.2. Media Type Registration
12.3. Transfer Coding Registration
12.4. ALPN Protocol ID Registration
 13. References
13.1. Normative References
13.2. Informative References
Appendix A. Collected ABNF
Appendix B. Differences between HTTP and MIME
B.1. MIME-Version
B.2. Conversion to Canonical Form
B.3. Conversion of Date Formats
B.4. Conversion of Content-Encoding
B.5. Conversion of Content-Transfer-Encoding
B.6. MHTML and Line Length Limitations
Appendix C. Changes from Previous RFCs
C.1. Changes from HTTP/0.9
C.2. Changes from HTTP/1.0
C.2.1. Multihomed Web Servers
C.2.2. Keep-Alive Connections
C.2.3. Introduction of Transfer-Encoding
C.3. Changes from RFC 7230
Acknowledgements
Index
Authors' Addresses

1. Introduction
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a stateless application-level
request/response protocol that uses extensible semantics and self-
descriptive messages for flexible interaction with network-based
hypertext information systems. HTTP/1.1 is defined by:

• This document
• "HTTP Semantics" [HTTP]
• "HTTP Caching" [CACHING]

This document specifies how HTTP semantics are conveyed using the
HTTP/1.1 message syntax, framing, and connection management
mechanisms. Its goal is to define the complete set of requirements for
HTTP/1.1 message parsers and message-forwarding intermediaries.

This document obsoletes the portions of RFC 7230 related to HTTP/1.1

messaging and connection management, with the changes being
summarized in Appendix C.3. The other parts of RFC 7230 are obsoleted
by "HTTP Semantics" [HTTP].

1.1. Requirements Notation

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL
NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT
RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be
interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only
when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Conformance criteria and considerations regarding error handling are

defined in Section 2 of [HTTP].

1.2. Syntax Notation

This specification uses the Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF)
notation of [RFC5234], extended with the notation for case-sensitivity in
strings defined in [RFC7405].

It also uses a list extension, defined in Section 5.6.1 of [HTTP], that allows
for compact definition of comma-separated lists using a "#" operator
(similar to how the "*" operator indicates repetition). Appendix A shows
the collected grammar with all list operators expanded to standard ABNF
notation.

As a convention, ABNF rule names prefixed with "obs-" denote obsolete

grammar rules that appear for historical reasons.

The following core rules are included by reference, as defined in

[RFC5234], Appendix B.1: ALPHA (letters), CR (carriage return), CRLF (CR
LF), CTL (controls), DIGIT (decimal 0-9), DQUOTE (double quote), HEXDIG
(hexadecimal 0-9/A-F/a-f), HTAB (horizontal tab), LF (line feed), OCTET
(any 8-bit sequence of data), SP (space), and VCHAR (any visible
[USASCII] character).

The rules below are defined in [HTTP]:

BWS = <BWS, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.3>

OWS = <OWS, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.3>
RWS = <RWS, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.3>
absolute-path = <absolute-path, see [HTTP], Section 4.1>
field-name = <field-name, see [HTTP], Section 5.1>
field-value = <field-value, see [HTTP], Section 5.5>
obs-text = <obs-text, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.4>
 quoted-string = <quoted-string, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.4>
token = <token, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.2>
transfer-coding =
<transfer-coding, see [HTTP], Section 10.1.4>

The rules below are defined in [URI]:

absolute-URI = <absolute-URI, see [URI], Section 4.3>

authority = <authority, see [URI], Section 3.2>
uri-host = <host, see [URI], Section 3.2.2>
port = <port, see [URI], Section 3.2.3>
query = <query, see [URI], Section 3.4>

2. Message
HTTP/1.1 clients and servers communicate by sending messages. See
Section 3 of [HTTP] for the general terminology and core concepts of
HTTP.

2.1. Message Format

An HTTP/1.1 message consists of a start-line followed by a CRLF and a
sequence of octets in a format similar to the Internet Message Format
[RFC5322]: zero or more header field lines (collectively referred to as the
"headers" or the "header section"), an empty line indicating the end of
the header section, and an optional message body.

HTTP-message = start-line CRLF

*( field-line CRLF )
CRLF
[ message-body ]

A message can be either a request from client to server or a response

from server to client. Syntactically, the two types of messages differ only
in the start-line, which is either a request-line (for requests) or a status-
line (for responses), and in the algorithm for determining the length of
the message body (Section 6).

start-line = request-line / status-line

In theory, a client could receive requests and a server could receive

responses, distinguishing them by their different start-line formats. In
practice, servers are implemented to only expect a request (a response is
interpreted as an unknown or invalid request method), and clients are
implemented to only expect a response.

HTTP makes use of some protocol elements similar to the Multipurpose

Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) [RFC2045]. See Appendix B for the
differences between HTTP and MIME messages.

2.2. Message Parsing

The normal procedure for parsing an HTTP message is to read the start-
line into a structure, read each header field line into a hash table by field
name until the empty line, and then use the parsed data to determine if
a message body is expected. If a message body has been indicated, then
it is read as a stream until an amount of octets equal to the message
body length is read or the connection is closed.

A recipient MUST parse an HTTP message as a sequence of octets in an

encoding that is a superset of US-ASCII [USASCII]. Parsing an HTTP
message as a stream of Unicode characters, without regard for the
specific encoding, creates security vulnerabilities due to the varying ways
that string processing libraries handle invalid multibyte character
sequences that contain the octet LF (%x0A). String-based parsers can
only be safely used within protocol elements after the element has been
extracted from the message, such as within a header field line value after
message parsing has delineated the individual field lines.

Although the line terminator for the start-line and fields is the sequence
CRLF, a recipient MAY recognize a single LF as a line terminator and
ignore any preceding CR.

A sender MUST NOT generate a bare CR (a CR character not immediately

followed by LF) within any protocol elements other than the content. A
recipient of such a bare CR MUST consider that element to be invalid or
replace each bare CR with SP before processing the element or
forwarding the message.

Older HTTP/1.0 user agent implementations might send an extra CRLF

after a POST request as a workaround for some early server applications
that failed to read message body content that was not terminated by a
line-ending. An HTTP/1.1 user agent MUST NOT preface or follow a
request with an extra CRLF. If terminating the request message body with
a line-ending is desired, then the user agent MUST count the terminating
CRLF octets as part of the message body length.
In the interest of robustness, a server that is expecting to receive and
parse a request-line SHOULD ignore at least one empty line (CRLF)
received prior to the request-line.

A sender MUST NOT send whitespace between the start-line and the first
header field.

A recipient that receives whitespace between the start-line and the first
header field MUST either reject the message as invalid or consume each
whitespace-preceded line without further processing of it (i.e., ignore the
entire line, along with any subsequent lines preceded by whitespace,
until a properly formed header field is received or the header section is
terminated). Rejection or removal of invalid whitespace-preceded lines is
necessary to prevent their misinterpretation by downstream recipients
that might be vulnerable to request smuggling (Section 11.2) or
response splitting (Section 11.1) attacks.

When a server listening only for HTTP request messages, or processing

what appears from the start-line to be an HTTP request message,
receives a sequence of octets that does not match the HTTP-message
grammar aside from the robustness exceptions listed above, the server
SHOULD respond with a 400 (Bad Request) response and close the
connection.

2.3. HTTP Version

HTTP uses a "<major>.<minor>" numbering scheme to indicate versions
of the protocol. This specification defines version "1.1". Section 2.5 of
[HTTP] specifies the semantics of HTTP version numbers.

The version of an HTTP/1.x message is indicated by an HTTP-version

field in the start-line. HTTP-version is case-sensitive.

HTTP-version = HTTP-name "/" DIGIT "." DIGIT

HTTP-name = %s"HTTP"

When an HTTP/1.1 message is sent to an HTTP/1.0 recipient [HTTP/1.0]

or a recipient whose version is unknown, the HTTP/1.1 message is
constructed such that it can be interpreted as a valid HTTP/1.0 message
if all of the newer features are ignored. This specification places
recipient-version requirements on some new features so that a
conformant sender will only use compatible features until it has
determined, through configuration or the receipt of a message, that the
recipient supports HTTP/1.1.

Intermediaries that process HTTP messages (i.e., all intermediaries other

than those acting as tunnels) MUST send their own HTTP-version in
forwarded messages, unless it is purposefully downgraded as a
workaround for an upstream issue. In other words, an intermediary is not
allowed to blindly forward the start-line without ensuring that the
protocol version in that message matches a version to which that
intermediary is conformant for both the receiving and sending of
messages. Forwarding an HTTP message without rewriting the HTTP-
version might result in communication errors when downstream
recipients use the message sender's version to determine what features
are safe to use for later communication with that sender.

A server MAY send an HTTP/1.0 response to an HTTP/1.1 request if it is

known or suspected that the client incorrectly implements the HTTP
specification and is incapable of correctly processing later version
responses, such as when a client fails to parse the version number
correctly or when an intermediary is known to blindly forward the HTTP-
version even when it doesn't conform to the given minor version of the
protocol. Such protocol downgrades SHOULD NOT be performed unless
triggered by specific client attributes, such as when one or more of the
request header fields (e.g., User-Agent) uniquely match the values sent
by a client known to be in error.

3. Request Line
A request-line begins with a method token, followed by a single space
(SP), the request-target, and another single space (SP), and ends with the
protocol version.

request-line = method SP request-target SP HTTP-version

Although the request-line grammar rule requires that each of the

component elements be separated by a single SP octet, recipients MAY
instead parse on whitespace-delimited word boundaries and, aside from
the CRLF terminator, treat any form of whitespace as the SP separator
while ignoring preceding or trailing whitespace; such whitespace
includes one or more of the following octets: SP, HTAB, VT (%x0B), FF
(%x0C), or bare CR. However, lenient parsing can result in request
smuggling security vulnerabilities if there are multiple recipients of the
message and each has its own unique interpretation of robustness (see
Section 11.2).

HTTP does not place a predefined limit on the length of a request-line,

as described in Section 2.3 of [HTTP]. A server that receives a method
longer than any that it implements SHOULD respond with a 501 (Not
Implemented) status code. A server that receives a request-target longer
than any URI it wishes to parse MUST respond with a 414 (URI Too Long)
status code (see Section 15.5.15 of [HTTP]).

Various ad hoc limitations on request-line length are found in practice. It

is RECOMMENDED that all HTTP senders and recipients support, at a
minimum, request-line lengths of 8000 octets.

3.1. Method
The method token indicates the request method to be performed on the
target resource. The request method is case-sensitive.

method = token

The request methods defined by this specification can be found in

Section 9 of [HTTP], along with information regarding the HTTP method
registry and considerations for defining new methods.

3.2. Request Target

The request-target identifies the target resource upon which to apply the
request. The client derives a request-target from its desired target URI.
There are four distinct formats for the request-target, depending on both
the method being requested and whether the request is to a proxy.

request-target = origin-form
/ absolute-form
/ authority-form
/ asterisk-form

No whitespace is allowed in the request-target. Unfortunately, some user

agents fail to properly encode or exclude whitespace found in hypertext
references, resulting in those disallowed characters being sent as the
request-target in a malformed request-line.

Recipients of an invalid request-line SHOULD respond with either a 400

(Bad Request) error or a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect with the
request-target properly encoded. A recipient SHOULD NOT attempt to
autocorrect and then process the request without a redirect, since the
invalid request-line might be deliberately crafted to bypass security
filters along the request chain.

A client MUST send a Host header field (Section 7.2 of [HTTP]) in all
HTTP/1.1 request messages. If the target URI includes an authority
component, then a client MUST send a field value for Host that is
identical to that authority component, excluding any userinfo
subcomponent and its "@" delimiter (Section 4.2 of [HTTP]). If the
authority component is missing or undefined for the target URI, then a
client MUST send a Host header field with an empty field value.

A server MUST respond with a 400 (Bad Request) status code to any
HTTP/1.1 request message that lacks a Host header field and to any
request message that contains more than one Host header field line or a
Host header field with an invalid field value.

3.2.1. origin-form
The most common form of request-target is the origin-form.

origin-form = absolute-path [ "?" query ]

When making a request directly to an origin server, other than a

CONNECT or server-wide OPTIONS request (as detailed below), a client
MUST send only the absolute path and query components of the target
URI as the request-target. If the target URI's path component is empty,
the client MUST send "/" as the path within the origin-form of request-
target. A Host header field is also sent, as defined in Section 7.2 of
[HTTP].

For example, a client wishing to retrieve a representation of the resource

identified as

http://www.example.org/where?q=now

directly from the origin server would open (or reuse) a TCP connection to
port 80 of the host "www.example.org" and send the lines:

GET /where?q=now HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.org
followed by the remainder of the request message.

3.2.2. absolute-form
When making a request to a proxy, other than a CONNECT or server-
wide OPTIONS request (as detailed below), a client MUST send the target
URI in absolute-form as the request-target.

absolute-form = absolute-URI

The proxy is requested to either service that request from a valid cache, if
possible, or make the same request on the client's behalf either to the
next inbound proxy server or directly to the origin server indicated by
the request-target. Requirements on such "forwarding" of messages are
defined in Section 7.6 of [HTTP].

An example absolute-form of request-line would be:

GET http://www.example.org/pub/WWW/TheProject.html HTTP/1.1

A client MUST send a Host header field in an HTTP/1.1 request even if

the request-target is in the absolute-form, since this allows the Host
information to be forwarded through ancient HTTP/1.0 proxies that
might not have implemented Host.

When a proxy receives a request with an absolute-form of request-

target, the proxy MUST ignore the received Host header field (if any) and
instead replace it with the host information of the request-target. A
proxy that forwards such a request MUST generate a new Host field value
based on the received request-target rather than forward the received
Host field value.

When an origin server receives a request with an absolute-form of

request-target, the origin server MUST ignore the received Host header
field (if any) and instead use the host information of the request-target.
Note that if the request-target does not have an authority component,
an empty Host header field will be sent in this case.

A server MUST accept the absolute-form in requests even though most

HTTP/1.1 clients will only send the absolute-form to a proxy.

3.2.3. authority-form
The authority-form of request-target is only used for CONNECT requests
(Section 9.3.6 of [HTTP]). It consists of only the uri-host and port number
of the tunnel destination, separated by a colon (":").

authority-form = uri-host ":" port

When making a CONNECT request to establish a tunnel through one or

more proxies, a client MUST send only the host and port of the tunnel
destination as the request-target. The client obtains the host and port
from the target URI's authority component, except that it sends the
scheme's default port if the target URI elides the port. For example, a
CONNECT request to "http://www.example.com" looks like the following:

CONNECT www.example.com:80 HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.com

3.2.4. asterisk-form
The asterisk-form of request-target is only used for a server-wide
OPTIONS request (Section 9.3.7 of [HTTP]).

asterisk-form = "*"

When a client wishes to request OPTIONS for the server as a whole, as

opposed to a specific named resource of that server, the client MUST
send only "*" (%x2A) as the request-target. For example,

OPTIONS * HTTP/1.1

If a proxy receives an OPTIONS request with an absolute-form of

request-target in which the URI has an empty path and no query
component, then the last proxy on the request chain MUST send a
request-target of "*" when it forwards the request to the indicated origin
server.

For example, the request

OPTIONS http://www.example.org:8001 HTTP/1.1

would be forwarded by the final proxy as

OPTIONS * HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org:8001

after connecting to port 8001 of host "www.example.org".

3.3. Reconstructing the Target URI
The target URI is the request-target when the request-target is in
absolute-form. In that case, a server will parse the URI into its generic
components for further evaluation.

Otherwise, the server reconstructs the target URI from the connection
context and various parts of the request message in order to identify the
target resource (Section 7.1 of [HTTP]):

• If the server's configuration provides for a fixed URI scheme, or a

scheme is provided by a trusted outbound gateway, that scheme is
used for the target URI. This is common in large-scale deployments
because a gateway server will receive the client's connection context
and replace that with their own connection to the inbound server.
Otherwise, if the request is received over a secured connection, the
target URI's scheme is "https"; if not, the scheme is "http".
• If the request-target is in authority-form, the target URI's authority
component is the request-target. Otherwise, the target URI's
authority component is the field value of the Host header field. If
there is no Host header field or if its field value is empty or invalid,
the target URI's authority component is empty.
• If the request-target is in authority-form or asterisk-form, the target
URI's combined path and query component is empty. Otherwise, the
target URI's combined path and query component is the request-
target.
• The components of a reconstructed target URI, once determined as
above, can be recombined into absolute-URI form by concatenating
the scheme, "://", authority, and combined path and query
component.

Example 1: The following message received over a secure connection

GET /pub/WWW/TheProject.html HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.org

has a target URI of

https://www.example.org/pub/WWW/TheProject.html

Example 2: The following message received over an insecure connection

OPTIONS * HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org:8080

has a target URI of

http://www.example.org:8080

If the target URI's authority component is empty and its URI scheme
requires a non-empty authority (as is the case for "http" and "https"), the
server can reject the request or determine whether a configured default
applies that is consistent with the incoming connection's context.
Context might include connection details like address and port, what
security has been applied, and locally defined information specific to that
server's configuration. An empty authority is replaced with the
configured default before further processing of the request.

Supplying a default name for authority within the context of a secured

connection is inherently unsafe if there is any chance that the user
agent's intended authority might differ from the default. A server that
can uniquely identify an authority from the request context MAY use that
identity as a default without this risk. Alternatively, it might be better to
redirect the request to a safe resource that explains how to obtain a new
client.

Note that reconstructing the client's target URI is only half of the process
for identifying a target resource. The other half is determining whether
that target URI identifies a resource for which the server is willing and
able to send a response, as defined in Section 7.4 of [HTTP].

4. Status Line
The first line of a response message is the status-line, consisting of the
protocol version, a space (SP), the status code, and another space and
ending with an OPTIONAL textual phrase describing the status code.

status-line = HTTP-version SP status-code SP [ reason-phrase ]

Although the status-line grammar rule requires that each of the

component elements be separated by a single SP octet, recipients MAY
instead parse on whitespace-delimited word boundaries and, aside from
the line terminator, treat any form of whitespace as the SP separator
while ignoring preceding or trailing whitespace; such whitespace
includes one or more of the following octets: SP, HTAB, VT (%x0B), FF
(%x0C), or bare CR. However, lenient parsing can result in response
splitting security vulnerabilities if there are multiple recipients of the
message and each has its own unique interpretation of robustness (see
Section 11.1).

The status-code element is a 3-digit integer code describing the result of

the server's attempt to understand and satisfy the client's corresponding
request. A recipient parses and interprets the remainder of the response
message in light of the semantics defined for that status code, if the
status code is recognized by that recipient, or in accordance with the
class of that status code when the specific code is unrecognized.

status-code = 3DIGIT

HTTP's core status codes are defined in Section 15 of [HTTP], along with
the classes of status codes, considerations for the definition of new
status codes, and the IANA registry for collecting such definitions.

The reason-phrase element exists for the sole purpose of providing a

textual description associated with the numeric status code, mostly out
of deference to earlier Internet application protocols that were more
frequently used with interactive text clients.

reason-phrase = 1*( HTAB / SP / VCHAR / obs-text )

A client SHOULD ignore the reason-phrase content because it is not a

reliable channel for information (it might be translated for a given locale,
overwritten by intermediaries, or discarded when the message is
forwarded via other versions of HTTP). A server MUST send the space
that separates the status-code from the reason-phrase even when the
reason-phrase is absent (i.e., the status-line would end with the space).

5. Field Syntax
Each field line consists of a case-insensitive field name followed by a
colon (":"), optional leading whitespace, the field line value, and optional
trailing whitespace.

field-line = field-name ":" OWS field-value OWS

Rules for parsing within field values are defined in Section 5.5 of [HTTP].
This section covers the generic syntax for header field inclusion within,
and extraction from, HTTP/1.1 messages.
5.1. Field Line Parsing
Messages are parsed using a generic algorithm, independent of the
individual field names. The contents within a given field line value are not
parsed until a later stage of message interpretation (usually after the
message's entire field section has been processed).

No whitespace is allowed between the field name and colon. In the past,
differences in the handling of such whitespace have led to security
vulnerabilities in request routing and response handling. A server MUST
reject, with a response status code of 400 (Bad Request), any received
request message that contains whitespace between a header field name
and colon. A proxy MUST remove any such whitespace from a response
message before forwarding the message downstream.

A field line value might be preceded and/or followed by optional

whitespace (OWS); a single SP preceding the field line value is preferred
for consistent readability by humans. The field line value does not
include that leading or trailing whitespace: OWS occurring before the
first non-whitespace octet of the field line value, or after the last non-
whitespace octet of the field line value, is excluded by parsers when
extracting the field line value from a field line.

5.2. Obsolete Line Folding

Historically, HTTP/1.x field values could be extended over multiple lines
by preceding each extra line with at least one space or horizontal tab
(obs-fold). This specification deprecates such line folding except within
the "message/http" media type (Section 10.1).

obs-fold = OWS CRLF RWS

; obsolete line folding

A sender MUST NOT generate a message that includes line folding (i.e.,
that has any field line value that contains a match to the obs-fold rule)
unless the message is intended for packaging within the "message/http"
media type.

A server that receives an obs-fold in a request message that is not within

a "message/http" container MUST either reject the message by sending a
400 (Bad Request), preferably with a representation explaining that
obsolete line folding is unacceptable, or replace each received obs-fold
with one or more SP octets prior to interpreting the field value or
forwarding the message downstream.

A proxy or gateway that receives an obs-fold in a response message that

is not within a "message/http" container MUST either discard the
message and replace it with a 502 (Bad Gateway) response, preferably
with a representation explaining that unacceptable line folding was
received, or replace each received obs-fold with one or more SP octets
prior to interpreting the field value or forwarding the message
downstream.

A user agent that receives an obs-fold in a response message that is not

within a "message/http" container MUST replace each received obs-fold
with one or more SP octets prior to interpreting the field value.

6. Message Body
The message body (if any) of an HTTP/1.1 message is used to carry
content (Section 6.4 of [HTTP]) for the request or response. The message
body is identical to the content unless a transfer coding has been
applied, as described in Section 6.1.

message-body = *OCTET

The rules for determining when a message body is present in an

HTTP/1.1 message differ for requests and responses.

The presence of a message body in a request is signaled by a Content-

Length or Transfer-Encoding header field. Request message framing is
independent of method semantics.

The presence of a message body in a response, as detailed in Section 6.3,

depends on both the request method to which it is responding and the
response status code. This corresponds to when response content is
allowed by HTTP semantics (Section 6.4.1 of [HTTP]).

6.1. Transfer-Encoding
The Transfer-Encoding header field lists the transfer coding names
corresponding to the sequence of transfer codings that have been (or
will be) applied to the content in order to form the message body.
Transfer codings are defined in Section 7.
 Transfer-Encoding = #transfer-coding
; defined in [HTTP], Section 10.1.4

Transfer-Encoding is analogous to the Content-Transfer-Encoding field of

MIME, which was designed to enable safe transport of binary data over a
7-bit transport service ([RFC2045], Section 6). However, safe transport
has a different focus for an 8bit-clean transfer protocol. In HTTP's case,
Transfer-Encoding is primarily intended to accurately delimit dynamically
generated content. It also serves to distinguish encodings that are only
applied in transit from the encodings that are a characteristic of the
selected representation.

A recipient MUST be able to parse the chunked transfer coding (Section

7.1) because it plays a crucial role in framing messages when the content
size is not known in advance. A sender MUST NOT apply the chunked
transfer coding more than once to a message body (i.e., chunking an
already chunked message is not allowed). If any transfer coding other
than chunked is applied to a request's content, the sender MUST apply
chunked as the final transfer coding to ensure that the message is
properly framed. If any transfer coding other than chunked is applied to
a response's content, the sender MUST either apply chunked as the final
transfer coding or terminate the message by closing the connection.

For example,

Transfer-Encoding: gzip, chunked

indicates that the content has been compressed using the gzip coding
and then chunked using the chunked coding while forming the message
body.

Unlike Content-Encoding (Section 8.4.1 of [HTTP]), Transfer-Encoding is a

property of the message, not of the representation. Any recipient along
the request/response chain MAY decode the received transfer coding(s)
or apply additional transfer coding(s) to the message body, assuming
that corresponding changes are made to the Transfer-Encoding field
value. Additional information about the encoding parameters can be
provided by other header fields not defined by this specification.

Transfer-Encoding MAY be sent in a response to a HEAD request or in a

304 (Not Modified) response (Section 15.4.5 of [HTTP]) to a GET request,
neither of which includes a message body, to indicate that the origin
server would have applied a transfer coding to the message body if the
request had been an unconditional GET. This indication is not required,
however, because any recipient on the response chain (including the
origin server) can remove transfer codings when they are not needed.

A server MUST NOT send a Transfer-Encoding header field in any

response with a status code of 1xx (Informational) or 204 (No Content). A
server MUST NOT send a Transfer-Encoding header field in any 2xx
(Successful) response to a CONNECT request (Section 9.3.6 of [HTTP]).

A server that receives a request message with a transfer coding it does

not understand SHOULD respond with 501 (Not Implemented).

Transfer-Encoding was added in HTTP/1.1. It is generally assumed that

implementations advertising only HTTP/1.0 support will not understand
how to process transfer-encoded content, and that an HTTP/1.0 message
received with a Transfer-Encoding is likely to have been forwarded
without proper handling of the chunked transfer coding in transit.

A client MUST NOT send a request containing Transfer-Encoding unless it

knows the server will handle HTTP/1.1 requests (or later minor revisions);
such knowledge might be in the form of specific user configuration or by
remembering the version of a prior received response. A server MUST
NOT send a response containing Transfer-Encoding unless the
corresponding request indicates HTTP/1.1 (or later minor revisions).

Early implementations of Transfer-Encoding would occasionally send

both a chunked transfer coding for message framing and an estimated
Content-Length header field for use by progress bars. This is why
Transfer-Encoding is defined as overriding Content-Length, as opposed
to them being mutually incompatible. Unfortunately, forwarding such a
message can lead to vulnerabilities regarding request smuggling
(Section 11.2) or response splitting (Section 11.1) attacks if any
downstream recipient fails to parse the message according to this
specification, particularly when a downstream recipient only implements
HTTP/1.0.

A server MAY reject a request that contains both Content-Length and

Transfer-Encoding or process such a request in accordance with the
Transfer-Encoding alone. Regardless, the server MUST close the
connection after responding to such a request to avoid the potential
attacks.
A server or client that receives an HTTP/1.0 message containing a
Transfer-Encoding header field MUST treat the message as if the framing
is faulty, even if a Content-Length is present, and close the connection
after processing the message. The message sender might have retained
a portion of the message, in buffer, that could be misinterpreted by
further use of the connection.

6.2. Content-Length
When a message does not have a Transfer-Encoding header field, a
Content-Length header field (Section 8.6 of [HTTP]) can provide the
anticipated size, as a decimal number of octets, for potential content. For
messages that do include content, the Content-Length field value
provides the framing information necessary for determining where the
data (and message) ends. For messages that do not include content, the
Content-Length indicates the size of the selected representation (Section
8.6 of [HTTP]).

A sender MUST NOT send a Content-Length header field in any message

that contains a Transfer-Encoding header field.

Note: HTTP's use of Content-Length for message framing differs

significantly from the same field's use in MIME, where it is an optional
field used only within the "message/external-body" media-type.

6.3. Message Body Length

The length of a message body is determined by one of the following (in
order of precedence):

1. Any response to a HEAD request and any response with a 1xx

(Informational), 204 (No Content), or 304 (Not Modified) status code
is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields,
regardless of the header fields present in the message, and thus
cannot contain a message body or trailer section.

2. Any 2xx (Successful) response to a CONNECT request implies that

the connection will become a tunnel immediately after the empty
line that concludes the header fields. A client MUST ignore any
Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header fields received in such
a message.

3. If a message is received with both a Transfer-Encoding and a

 Content-Length header field, the Transfer-Encoding overrides the
Content-Length. Such a message might indicate an attempt to
perform request smuggling (Section 11.2) or response splitting
(Section 11.1) and ought to be handled as an error. An intermediary
that chooses to forward the message MUST first remove the
received Content-Length field and process the Transfer-Encoding (as
described below) prior to forwarding the message downstream.

4. If a Transfer-Encoding header field is present and the chunked

transfer coding (Section 7.1) is the final encoding, the message body
length is determined by reading and decoding the chunked data
until the transfer coding indicates the data is complete.

If a Transfer-Encoding header field is present in a response and the

chunked transfer coding is not the final encoding, the message body
length is determined by reading the connection until it is closed by
the server.

If a Transfer-Encoding header field is present in a request and the

chunked transfer coding is not the final encoding, the message body
length cannot be determined reliably; the server MUST respond with
the 400 (Bad Request) status code and then close the connection.

5. If a message is received without Transfer-Encoding and with an

invalid Content-Length header field, then the message framing is
invalid and the recipient MUST treat it as an unrecoverable error,
unless the field value can be successfully parsed as a comma-
separated list (Section 5.6.1 of [HTTP]), all values in the list are valid,
and all values in the list are the same (in which case, the message is
processed with that single value used as the Content-Length field
value). If the unrecoverable error is in a request message, the server
MUST respond with a 400 (Bad Request) status code and then close
the connection. If it is in a response message received by a proxy,
the proxy MUST close the connection to the server, discard the
received response, and send a 502 (Bad Gateway) response to the
client. If it is in a response message received by a user agent, the
user agent MUST close the connection to the server and discard the
received response.

6. If a valid Content-Length header field is present without Transfer-

Encoding, its decimal value defines the expected message body
 length in octets. If the sender closes the connection or the recipient
times out before the indicated number of octets are received, the
recipient MUST consider the message to be incomplete and close
the connection.

7. If this is a request message and none of the above are true, then the
message body length is zero (no message body is present).

8. Otherwise, this is a response message without a declared message

body length, so the message body length is determined by the
number of octets received prior to the server closing the connection.

Since there is no way to distinguish a successfully completed, close-

delimited response message from a partially received message
interrupted by network failure, a server SHOULD generate encoding or
length-delimited messages whenever possible. The close-delimiting
feature exists primarily for backwards compatibility with HTTP/1.0.

Note: Request messages are never close-delimited because they are

always explicitly framed by length or transfer coding, with the absence of
both implying the request ends immediately after the header section.

A server MAY reject a request that contains a message body but not a
Content-Length by responding with 411 (Length Required).

Unless a transfer coding other than chunked has been applied, a client
that sends a request containing a message body SHOULD use a valid
Content-Length header field if the message body length is known in
advance, rather than the chunked transfer coding, since some existing
services respond to chunked with a 411 (Length Required) status code
even though they understand the chunked transfer coding. This is
typically because such services are implemented via a gateway that
requires a content length in advance of being called, and the server is
unable or unwilling to buffer the entire request before processing.

A user agent that sends a request that contains a message body MUST
send either a valid Content-Length header field or use the chunked
transfer coding. A client MUST NOT use the chunked transfer coding
unless it knows the server will handle HTTP/1.1 (or later) requests; such
knowledge can be in the form of specific user configuration or by
remembering the version of a prior received response.
If the final response to the last request on a connection has been
completely received and there remains additional data to read, a user
agent MAY discard the remaining data or attempt to determine if that
data belongs as part of the prior message body, which might be the case
if the prior message's Content-Length value is incorrect. A client MUST
NOT process, cache, or forward such extra data as a separate response,
since such behavior would be vulnerable to cache poisoning.

7. Transfer Codings
Transfer coding names are used to indicate an encoding transformation
that has been, can be, or might need to be applied to a message's
content in order to ensure "safe transport" through the network. This
differs from a content coding in that the transfer coding is a property of
the message rather than a property of the representation that is being
transferred.

All transfer-coding names are case-insensitive and ought to be

registered within the HTTP Transfer Coding registry, as defined in Section
7.3. They are used in the Transfer-Encoding (Section 6.1) and TE (Section
10.1.4 of [HTTP]) header fields (the latter also defining the "transfer-
coding" grammar).

7.1. Chunked Transfer Coding

The chunked transfer coding wraps content in order to transfer it as a
series of chunks, each with its own size indicator, followed by an
OPTIONAL trailer section containing trailer fields. Chunked enables
content streams of unknown size to be transferred as a sequence of
length-delimited buffers, which enables the sender to retain connection
persistence and the recipient to know when it has received the entire
message.

chunked-body = *chunk
last-chunk
trailer-section
CRLF

chunk = chunk-size [ chunk-ext ] CRLF

chunk-data CRLF
chunk-size = 1*HEXDIG
last-chunk = 1*("0") [ chunk-ext ] CRLF
 chunk-data = 1*OCTET ; a sequence of chunk-size octets

The chunk-size field is a string of hex digits indicating the size of the
chunk-data in octets. The chunked transfer coding is complete when a
chunk with a chunk-size of zero is received, possibly followed by a trailer
section, and finally terminated by an empty line.

A recipient MUST be able to parse and decode the chunked transfer

coding.

HTTP/1.1 does not define any means to limit the size of a chunked
response such that an intermediary can be assured of buffering the
entire response. Additionally, very large chunk sizes may cause overflows
or loss of precision if their values are not represented accurately in a
receiving implementation. Therefore, recipients MUST anticipate
potentially large hexadecimal numerals and prevent parsing errors due
to integer conversion overflows or precision loss due to integer
representation.

The chunked coding does not define any parameters. Their presence
SHOULD be treated as an error.

7.1.1. Chunk Extensions

The chunked coding allows each chunk to include zero or more chunk
extensions, immediately following the chunk-size, for the sake of
supplying per-chunk metadata (such as a signature or hash), mid-
message control information, or randomization of message body size.

chunk-ext = *( BWS ";" BWS chunk-ext-name

[ BWS "=" BWS chunk-ext-val ] )

chunk-ext-name = token
chunk-ext-val = token / quoted-string

The chunked coding is specific to each connection and is likely to be

removed or recoded by each recipient (including intermediaries) before
any higher-level application would have a chance to inspect the
extensions. Hence, the use of chunk extensions is generally limited to
specialized HTTP services such as "long polling" (where client and server
can have shared expectations regarding the use of chunk extensions) or
for padding within an end-to-end secured connection.
A recipient MUST ignore unrecognized chunk extensions. A server ought
to limit the total length of chunk extensions received in a request to an
amount reasonable for the services provided, in the same way that it
applies length limitations and timeouts for other parts of a message, and
generate an appropriate 4xx (Client Error) response if that amount is
exceeded.

7.1.2. Chunked Trailer Section

A trailer section allows the sender to include additional fields at the end
of a chunked message in order to supply metadata that might be
dynamically generated while the content is sent, such as a message
integrity check, digital signature, or post-processing status. The proper
use and limitations of trailer fields are defined in Section 6.5 of [HTTP].

trailer-section = *( field-line CRLF )

A recipient that removes the chunked coding from a message MAY

selectively retain or discard the received trailer fields. A recipient that
retains a received trailer field MUST either store/forward the trailer field
separately from the received header fields or merge the received trailer
field into the header section. A recipient MUST NOT merge a received
trailer field into the header section unless its corresponding header field
definition explicitly permits and instructs how the trailer field value can
be safely merged.

7.1.3. Decoding Chunked

A process for decoding the chunked transfer coding can be represented
in pseudo-code as:

length := 0
read chunk-size, chunk-ext (if any), and CRLF
while (chunk-size > 0) {
read chunk-data and CRLF
append chunk-data to content
length := length + chunk-size
read chunk-size, chunk-ext (if any), and CRLF
}
read trailer field
while (trailer field is not empty) {
if (trailer fields are stored/forwarded separately) {
append trailer field to existing trailer fields
}
 else if (trailer field is understood and defined as mergeable) {
merge trailer field with existing header fields
}
else {
discard trailer field
}
read trailer field
}
Content-Length := length
Remove "chunked" from Transfer-Encoding

7.2. Transfer Codings for Compression

The following transfer coding names for compression are defined by the
same algorithm as their corresponding content coding:

compress (and x-compress)

See Section 8.4.1.1 of [HTTP].

deflate
See Section 8.4.1.2 of [HTTP].

gzip (and x-gzip)

See Section 8.4.1.3 of [HTTP].

The compression codings do not define any parameters. The presence of

parameters with any of these compression codings SHOULD be treated
as an error.

7.3. Transfer Coding Registry

The "HTTP Transfer Coding Registry" defines the namespace for transfer
coding names. It is maintained at https://www.iana.org/assignments/
http-parameters.

Registrations MUST include the following fields:

• Name
• Description
• Pointer to specification text

Names of transfer codings MUST NOT overlap with names of content

codings (Section 8.4.1 of [HTTP]) unless the encoding transformation is
identical, as is the case for the compression codings defined in Section
7.2.
The TE header field (Section 10.1.4 of [HTTP]) uses a pseudo-parameter
named "q" as the rank value when multiple transfer codings are
acceptable. Future registrations of transfer codings SHOULD NOT define
parameters called "q" (case-insensitively) in order to avoid ambiguities.

Values to be added to this namespace require IETF Review (see Section

4.8 of [RFC8126]) and MUST conform to the purpose of transfer coding
defined in this specification.

Use of program names for the identification of encoding formats is not

desirable and is discouraged for future encodings.

7.4. Negotiating Transfer Codings

The TE field (Section 10.1.4 of [HTTP]) is used in HTTP/1.1 to indicate
what transfer codings, besides chunked, the client is willing to accept in
the response and whether the client is willing to preserve trailer fields in
a chunked transfer coding.

A client MUST NOT send the chunked transfer coding name in TE;
chunked is always acceptable for HTTP/1.1 recipients.

Three examples of TE use are below.

TE: deflate
TE:
TE: trailers, deflate;q=0.5

When multiple transfer codings are acceptable, the client MAY rank the
codings by preference using a case-insensitive "q" parameter (similar to
the qvalues used in content negotiation fields; see Section 12.4.2 of
[HTTP]). The rank value is a real number in the range 0 through 1, where
0.001 is the least preferred and 1 is the most preferred; a value of 0
means "not acceptable".

If the TE field value is empty or if no TE field is present, the only

acceptable transfer coding is chunked. A message with no transfer
coding is always acceptable.

The keyword "trailers" indicates that the sender will not discard trailer
fields, as described in Section 6.5 of [HTTP].

Since the TE header field only applies to the immediate connection, a

sender of TE MUST also send a "TE" connection option within the
Connection header field (Section 7.6.1 of [HTTP]) in order to prevent the
TE header field from being forwarded by intermediaries that do not
support its semantics.

8. Handling Incomplete Messages

A server that receives an incomplete request message, usually due to a
canceled request or a triggered timeout exception, MAY send an error
response prior to closing the connection.

A client that receives an incomplete response message, which can occur

when a connection is closed prematurely or when decoding a
supposedly chunked transfer coding fails, MUST record the message as
incomplete. Cache requirements for incomplete responses are defined in
Section 3.3 of [CACHING].

If a response terminates in the middle of the header section (before the

empty line is received) and the status code might rely on header fields to
convey the full meaning of the response, then the client cannot assume
that meaning has been conveyed; the client might need to repeat the
request in order to determine what action to take next.

A message body that uses the chunked transfer coding is incomplete if

the zero-sized chunk that terminates the encoding has not been
received. A message that uses a valid Content-Length is incomplete if the
size of the message body received (in octets) is less than the value given
by Content-Length. A response that has neither chunked transfer coding
nor Content-Length is terminated by closure of the connection and, if
the header section was received intact, is considered complete unless an
error was indicated by the underlying connection (e.g., an "incomplete
close" in TLS would leave the response incomplete, as described in
Section 9.8).

9. Connection Management
HTTP messaging is independent of the underlying transport- or session-
layer connection protocol(s). HTTP only presumes a reliable transport
with in-order delivery of requests and the corresponding in-order
delivery of responses. The mapping of HTTP request and response
structures onto the data units of an underlying transport protocol is
outside the scope of this specification.
As described in Section 7.3 of [HTTP], the specific connection protocols
to be used for an HTTP interaction are determined by client
configuration and the target URI. For example, the "http" URI scheme
(Section 4.2.1 of [HTTP]) indicates a default connection of TCP over IP,
with a default TCP port of 80, but the client might be configured to use a
proxy via some other connection, port, or protocol.

HTTP implementations are expected to engage in connection

management, which includes maintaining the state of current
connections, establishing a new connection or reusing an existing
connection, processing messages received on a connection, detecting
connection failures, and closing each connection. Most clients maintain
multiple connections in parallel, including more than one connection per
server endpoint. Most servers are designed to maintain thousands of
concurrent connections, while controlling request queues to enable fair
use and detect denial-of-service attacks.

9.1. Establishment
It is beyond the scope of this specification to describe how connections
are established via various transport- or session-layer protocols. Each
HTTP connection maps to one underlying transport connection.

9.2. Associating a Response to a Request

HTTP/1.1 does not include a request identifier for associating a given
request message with its corresponding one or more response
messages. Hence, it relies on the order of response arrival to correspond
exactly to the order in which requests are made on the same connection.
More than one response message per request only occurs when one or
more informational responses (1xx; see Section 15.2 of [HTTP]) precede a
final response to the same request.

A client that has more than one outstanding request on a connection

MUST maintain a list of outstanding requests in the order sent and MUST
associate each received response message on that connection to the first
outstanding request that has not yet received a final (non-1xx) response.

If a client receives data on a connection that doesn't have outstanding

requests, the client MUST NOT consider that data to be a valid response;
the client SHOULD close the connection, since message delimitation is
now ambiguous, unless the data consists only of one or more CRLF
(which can be discarded per Section 2.2).

9.3. Persistence
HTTP/1.1 defaults to the use of persistent connections, allowing multiple
requests and responses to be carried over a single connection. HTTP
implementations SHOULD support persistent connections.

A recipient determines whether a connection is persistent or not based

on the protocol version and Connection header field (Section 7.6.1 of
[HTTP]) in the most recently received message, if any:

• If the "close" connection option is present (Section 9.6), the

connection will not persist after the current response; else,
• If the received protocol is HTTP/1.1 (or later), the connection will
persist after the current response; else,
• If the received protocol is HTTP/1.0, the "keep-alive" connection
option is present, either the recipient is not a proxy or the message
is a response, and the recipient wishes to honor the HTTP/1.0 "keep-
alive" mechanism, the connection will persist after the current
response; otherwise,
• The connection will close after the current response.

A client that does not support persistent connections MUST send the
"close" connection option in every request message.

A server that does not support persistent connections MUST send the
"close" connection option in every response message that does not have
a 1xx (Informational) status code.

A client MAY send additional requests on a persistent connection until it

sends or receives a "close" connection option or receives an HTTP/1.0
response without a "keep-alive" connection option.

In order to remain persistent, all messages on a connection need to have

a self-defined message length (i.e., one not defined by closure of the
connection), as described in Section 6. A server MUST read the entire
request message body or close the connection after sending its
response; otherwise, the remaining data on a persistent connection
would be misinterpreted as the next request. Likewise, a client MUST
read the entire response message body if it intends to reuse the same
connection for a subsequent request.
A proxy server MUST NOT maintain a persistent connection with an
HTTP/1.0 client (see Appendix C.2.2 for information and discussion of the
problems with the Keep-Alive header field implemented by many
HTTP/1.0 clients).

See Appendix C.2.2 for more information on backwards compatibility

with HTTP/1.0 clients.

9.3.1. Retrying Requests

Connections can be closed at any time, with or without intention.
Implementations ought to anticipate the need to recover from
asynchronous close events. The conditions under which a client can
automatically retry a sequence of outstanding requests are defined in
Section 9.2.2 of [HTTP].

9.3.2. Pipelining
A client that supports persistent connections MAY pipeline its requests
(i.e., send multiple requests without waiting for each response). A server
MAY process a sequence of pipelined requests in parallel if they all have
safe methods (Section 9.2.1 of [HTTP]), but it MUST send the
corresponding responses in the same order that the requests were
received.

A client that pipelines requests SHOULD retry unanswered requests if the

connection closes before it receives all of the corresponding responses.
When retrying pipelined requests after a failed connection (a connection
not explicitly closed by the server in its last complete response), a client
MUST NOT pipeline immediately after connection establishment, since
the first remaining request in the prior pipeline might have caused an
error response that can be lost again if multiple requests are sent on a
prematurely closed connection (see the TCP reset problem described in
Section 9.6).

Idempotent methods (Section 9.2.2 of [HTTP]) are significant to

pipelining because they can be automatically retried after a connection
failure. A user agent SHOULD NOT pipeline requests after a non-
idempotent method, until the final response status code for that method
has been received, unless the user agent has a means to detect and
recover from partial failure conditions involving the pipelined sequence.

An intermediary that receives pipelined requests MAY pipeline those

requests when forwarding them inbound, since it can rely on the
outbound user agent(s) to determine what requests can be safely
pipelined. If the inbound connection fails before receiving a response,
the pipelining intermediary MAY attempt to retry a sequence of requests
that have yet to receive a response if the requests all have idempotent
methods; otherwise, the pipelining intermediary SHOULD forward any
received responses and then close the corresponding outbound
connection(s) so that the outbound user agent(s) can recover
accordingly.

9.4. Concurrency
A client ought to limit the number of simultaneous open connections
that it maintains to a given server.

Previous revisions of HTTP gave a specific number of connections as a

ceiling, but this was found to be impractical for many applications. As a
result, this specification does not mandate a particular maximum number
of connections but, instead, encourages clients to be conservative when
opening multiple connections.

Multiple connections are typically used to avoid the "head-of-line

blocking" problem, wherein a request that takes significant server-side
processing and/or transfers very large content would block subsequent
requests on the same connection. However, each connection consumes
server resources.

Furthermore, using multiple connections can cause undesirable side

effects in congested networks. Using larger numbers of connections can
also cause side effects in otherwise uncongested networks, because their
aggregate and initially synchronized sending behavior can cause
congestion that would not have been present if fewer parallel
connections had been used.

Note that a server might reject traffic that it deems abusive or

characteristic of a denial-of-service attack, such as an excessive number
of open connections from a single client.

9.5. Failures and Timeouts

Servers will usually have some timeout value beyond which they will no
longer maintain an inactive connection. Proxy servers might make this a
higher value since it is likely that the client will be making more
connections through the same proxy server. The use of persistent
connections places no requirements on the length (or existence) of this
timeout for either the client or the server.

A client or server that wishes to time out SHOULD issue a graceful close
on the connection. Implementations SHOULD constantly monitor open
connections for a received closure signal and respond to it as
appropriate, since prompt closure of both sides of a connection enables
allocated system resources to be reclaimed.

A client, server, or proxy MAY close the transport connection at any time.
For example, a client might have started to send a new request at the
same time that the server has decided to close the "idle" connection.
From the server's point of view, the connection is being closed while it
was idle, but from the client's point of view, a request is in progress.

A server SHOULD sustain persistent connections, when possible, and

allow the underlying transport's flow-control mechanisms to resolve
temporary overloads rather than terminate connections with the
expectation that clients will retry. The latter technique can exacerbate
network congestion or server load.

A client sending a message body SHOULD monitor the network

connection for an error response while it is transmitting the request. If
the client sees a response that indicates the server does not wish to
receive the message body and is closing the connection, the client
SHOULD immediately cease transmitting the body and close its side of
the connection.

9.6. Tear-down
The "close" connection option is defined as a signal that the sender will
close this connection after completion of the response. A sender
SHOULD send a Connection header field (Section 7.6.1 of [HTTP])
containing the "close" connection option when it intends to close a
connection. For example,

Connection: close

as a request header field indicates that this is the last request that the
client will send on this connection, while in a response, the same field
indicates that the server is going to close this connection after the
response message is complete.

Note that the field name "Close" is reserved, since using that name as a
header field might conflict with the "close" connection option.

A client that sends a "close" connection option MUST NOT send further
requests on that connection (after the one containing the "close") and
MUST close the connection after reading the final response message
corresponding to this request.

A server that receives a "close" connection option MUST initiate closure

of the connection (see below) after it sends the final response to the
request that contained the "close" connection option. The server
SHOULD send a "close" connection option in its final response on that
connection. The server MUST NOT process any further requests received
on that connection.

A server that sends a "close" connection option MUST initiate closure of

the connection (see below) after it sends the response containing the
"close" connection option. The server MUST NOT process any further
requests received on that connection.

A client that receives a "close" connection option MUST cease sending

requests on that connection and close the connection after reading the
response message containing the "close" connection option; if additional
pipelined requests had been sent on the connection, the client SHOULD
NOT assume that they will be processed by the server.

If a server performs an immediate close of a TCP connection, there is a

significant risk that the client will not be able to read the last HTTP
response. If the server receives additional data from the client on a fully
closed connection, such as another request sent by the client before
receiving the server's response, the server's TCP stack will send a reset
packet to the client; unfortunately, the reset packet might erase the
client's unacknowledged input buffers before they can be read and
interpreted by the client's HTTP parser.

To avoid the TCP reset problem, servers typically close a connection in

stages. First, the server performs a half-close by closing only the write
side of the read/write connection. The server then continues to read
from the connection until it receives a corresponding close by the client,
or until the server is reasonably certain that its own TCP stack has
received the client's acknowledgement of the packet(s) containing the
server's last response. Finally, the server fully closes the connection.

It is unknown whether the reset problem is exclusive to TCP or might

also be found in other transport connection protocols.

Note that a TCP connection that is half-closed by the client does not
delimit a request message, nor does it imply that the client is no longer
interested in a response. In general, transport signals cannot be relied
upon to signal edge cases, since HTTP/1.1 is independent of transport.

9.7. TLS Connection Initiation

Conceptually, HTTP/TLS is simply sending HTTP messages over a
connection secured via TLS [TLS13].

The HTTP client also acts as the TLS client. It initiates a connection to the
server on the appropriate port and sends the TLS ClientHello to begin
the TLS handshake. When the TLS handshake has finished, the client may
then initiate the first HTTP request. All HTTP data MUST be sent as TLS
"application data" but is otherwise treated like a normal connection for
HTTP (including potential reuse as a persistent connection).

9.8. TLS Connection Closure

TLS uses an exchange of closure alerts prior to (non-error) connection
closure to provide secure connection closure; see Section 6.1 of [TLS13].
When a valid closure alert is received, an implementation can be assured
that no further data will be received on that connection.

When an implementation knows that it has sent or received all the

message data that it cares about, typically by detecting HTTP message
boundaries, it might generate an "incomplete close" by sending a closure
alert and then closing the connection without waiting to receive the
corresponding closure alert from its peer.

An incomplete close does not call into question the security of the data
already received, but it could indicate that subsequent data might have
been truncated. As TLS is not directly aware of HTTP message framing, it
is necessary to examine the HTTP data itself to determine whether
messages are complete. Handling of incomplete messages is defined in
Section 8.
When encountering an incomplete close, a client SHOULD treat as
completed all requests for which it has received either

1. as much data as specified in the Content-Length header field or

2. the terminal zero-length chunk (when Transfer-Encoding of chunked
is used).

A response that has neither chunked transfer coding nor Content-Length

is complete only if a valid closure alert has been received. Treating an
incomplete message as complete could expose implementations to
attack.

A client detecting an incomplete close SHOULD recover gracefully.

Clients MUST send a closure alert before closing the connection. Clients
that do not expect to receive any more data MAY choose not to wait for
the server's closure alert and simply close the connection, thus
generating an incomplete close on the server side.

Servers SHOULD be prepared to receive an incomplete close from the

client, since the client can often locate the end of server data.

Servers MUST attempt to initiate an exchange of closure alerts with the

client before closing the connection. Servers MAY close the connection
after sending the closure alert, thus generating an incomplete close on
the client side.

10. Enclosing Messages as Data

10.1. Media Type message/http
The "message/http" media type can be used to enclose a single HTTP
request or response message, provided that it obeys the MIME
restrictions for all "message" types regarding line length and encodings.
Because of the line length limitations, field values within "message/http"
are allowed to use line folding (obs-fold), as described in Section 5.2, to
convey the field value over multiple lines. A recipient of "message/http"
data MUST replace any obsolete line folding with one or more SP
characters when the message is consumed.

Type name: message

Subtype name: http

 Required parameters: N/A

Optional parameters: version, msgtype

version: The HTTP-version number of the enclosed message (e.g.,
"1.1"). If not present, the version can be determined from the first
line of the body.

msgtype: The message type — "request" or "response". If not

present, the type can be determined from the first line of the body.

Encoding considerations: only "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" are

permitted

Security considerations: see Section 11

Interoperability considerations: N/A

Published specification: RFC 9112 (see Section 10.1).

Applications that use this media type: N/A

Fragment identifier considerations: N/A

Additional information: Magic number(s): N/A

Deprecated alias names for this type: N/A

File extension(s): N/A

Macintosh file type code(s): N/A

Person and email address to contact for further information: See

Authors' Addresses section.

Intended usage: COMMON

Restrictions on usage: N/A

Author: See Authors' Addresses section.

Change controller: IESG

10.2. Media Type application/http

The "application/http" media type can be used to enclose a pipeline of
one or more HTTP request or response messages (not intermixed).

Type name: application

Subtype name: http

Required parameters: N/A

 Optional parameters: version, msgtype
version: The HTTP-version number of the enclosed messages (e.g.,
"1.1"). If not present, the version can be determined from the first
line of the body.

msgtype: The message type — "request" or "response". If not

present, the type can be determined from the first line of the body.

Encoding considerations: HTTP messages enclosed by this type are

in "binary" format; use of an appropriate Content-Transfer-Encoding is
required when transmitted via email.

Security considerations: see Section 11

Interoperability considerations: N/A

Published specification: RFC 9112 (see Section 10.2).

Applications that use this media type: N/A

Fragment identifier considerations: N/A

Additional information: Deprecated alias names for this type:

N/A

Magic number(s): N/A

File extension(s): N/A

Macintosh file type code(s): N/A

Person and email address to contact for further information: See

Authors' Addresses section.

Intended usage: COMMON

Restrictions on usage: N/A

Author: See Authors' Addresses section.

Change controller: IESG

11. Security Considerations

This section is meant to inform developers, information providers, and
users about known security considerations relevant to HTTP message
syntax and parsing. Security considerations about HTTP semantics,
content, and routing are addressed in [HTTP].

11.1. Response Splitting

Response splitting (a.k.a. CRLF injection) is a common technique, used in
various attacks on Web usage, that exploits the line-based nature of
HTTP message framing and the ordered association of requests to
responses on persistent connections [Klein]. This technique can be
particularly damaging when the requests pass through a shared cache.

Response splitting exploits a vulnerability in servers (usually within an

application server) where an attacker can send encoded data within
some parameter of the request that is later decoded and echoed within
any of the response header fields of the response. If the decoded data is
crafted to look like the response has ended and a subsequent response
has begun, the response has been split, and the content within the
apparent second response is controlled by the attacker. The attacker can
then make any other request on the same persistent connection and
trick the recipients (including intermediaries) into believing that the
second half of the split is an authoritative answer to the second request.

For example, a parameter within the request-target might be read by an

application server and reused within a redirect, resulting in the same
parameter being echoed in the Location header field of the response. If
the parameter is decoded by the application and not properly encoded
when placed in the response field, the attacker can send encoded CRLF
octets and other content that will make the application's single response
look like two or more responses.

A common defense against response splitting is to filter requests for

data that looks like encoded CR and LF (e.g., "%0D" and "%0A").
However, that assumes the application server is only performing URI
decoding rather than more obscure data transformations like charset
transcoding, XML entity translation, base64 decoding, sprintf
reformatting, etc. A more effective mitigation is to prevent anything
other than the server's core protocol libraries from sending a CR or LF
within the header section, which means restricting the output of header
fields to APIs that filter for bad octets and not allowing application
servers to write directly to the protocol stream.

11.2. Request Smuggling

Request smuggling ([Linhart]) is a technique that exploits differences in
protocol parsing among various recipients to hide additional requests
(which might otherwise be blocked or disabled by policy) within an
apparently harmless request. Like response splitting, request smuggling
can lead to a variety of attacks on HTTP usage.

This specification has introduced new requirements on request parsing,

particularly with regard to message framing in Section 6.3, to reduce the
effectiveness of request smuggling.

11.3. Message Integrity

HTTP does not define a specific mechanism for ensuring message
integrity, instead relying on the error-detection ability of underlying
transport protocols and the use of length or chunk-delimited framing to
detect completeness. Historically, the lack of a single integrity
mechanism has been justified by the informal nature of most HTTP
communication. However, the prevalence of HTTP as an information
access mechanism has resulted in its increasing use within environments
where verification of message integrity is crucial.

The mechanisms provided with the "https" scheme, such as

authenticated encryption, provide protection against modification of
messages. Care is needed, however, to ensure that connection closure
cannot be used to truncate messages (see Section 9.8). User agents
might refuse to accept incomplete messages or treat them specially. For
example, a browser being used to view medical history or drug
interaction information needs to indicate to the user when such
information is detected by the protocol to be incomplete, expired, or
corrupted during transfer. Such mechanisms might be selectively
enabled via user agent extensions or the presence of message integrity
metadata in a response.

The "http" scheme provides no protection against accidental or malicious

modification of messages.

Extensions to the protocol might be used to mitigate the risk of

unwanted modification of messages by intermediaries, even when the
"https" scheme is used. Integrity might be assured by using message
authentication codes or digital signatures that are selectively added to
messages via extensible metadata fields.

11.4. Message Confidentiality

HTTP relies on underlying transport protocols to provide message
confidentiality when that is desired. HTTP has been specifically designed
to be independent of the transport protocol, such that it can be used
over many forms of encrypted connection, with the selection of such
transports being identified by the choice of URI scheme or within user
agent configuration.

The "https" scheme can be used to identify resources that require a

confidential connection, as described in Section 4.2.2 of [HTTP].

12. IANA Considerations

The change controller for the following registrations is: "IETF
(iesg@ietf.org) - Internet Engineering Task Force".

12.1. Field Name Registration

IANA has added the following field names to the "Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP) Field Name Registry" at https://www.iana.org/
assignments/http-fields, as described in Section 18.4 of [HTTP].

Field Name Status Section Comments

Close permanent 9.6 (reserved)
MIME-Version permanent B.1
Transfer-Encoding permanent 6.1

Table 1

12.2. Media Type Registration

IANA has updated the "Media Types" registry at https://www.iana.org/
assignments/media-types with the registration information in Sections
10.1 and 10.2 for the media types "message/http" and "application/http",
respectively.

12.3. Transfer Coding Registration

IANA has updated the "HTTP Transfer Coding Registry" at https://
www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters/ with the registration
procedure of Section 7.3 and the content coding names summarized in
the table below.
Name Description Section
chunked Transfer in a series of chunks 7.1
compress UNIX "compress" data format [Welch] 7.2
"deflate" compressed data ([RFC1951])
deflate 7.2
inside the "zlib" data format ([RFC1950])
gzip GZIP file format [RFC1952] 7.2
trailers (reserved) 12.3
x-
Deprecated (alias for compress) 7.2
compress
x-gzip Deprecated (alias for gzip) 7.2

Table 2

Note: the coding name "trailers" is reserved because its use would
conflict with the keyword "trailers" in the TE header field (Section 10.1.4
of [HTTP]).

12.4. ALPN Protocol ID Registration

IANA has updated the "TLS Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation
(ALPN) Protocol IDs" registry at https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-
extensiontype-values/ with the registration below:

Protocol Identification Sequence Reference

0x68 0x74 0x74 0x70 0x2f 0x31 0x2e RFC
HTTP/1.1
0x31 ("http/1.1") 9112

Table 3

13. References
13.1. Normative References
[CACHING] Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed.,
“HTTP Caching”, STD 98, RFC 9111, DOI 10.17487/RFC9111, June 2022.

[HTTP] Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke, Ed.,
“HTTP Semantics”, STD 97, RFC 9110, DOI 10.17487/RFC9110, June
2022.

[RFC1950] Deutsch, P. and J-L. Gailly, “ZLIB Compressed Data

 Format Specification version 3.3”, RFC 1950, DOI 10.17487/RFC1950,
May 1996, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1950>.

[RFC1951] Deutsch, P., “DEFLATE Compressed Data Format

Specification version 1.3”, RFC 1951, DOI 10.17487/RFC1951, May
1996, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1951>.

[RFC1952] Deutsch, P., “GZIP file format specification version 4.3”,

RFC 1952, DOI 10.17487/RFC1952, May 1996, <https://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfc1952>.

[RFC2119] Bradner, S., “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate

Requirement Levels”, BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March
1997, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

[RFC5234] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, “Augmented BNF for

Syntax Specifications: ABNF”, STD 68, RFC 5234, DOI 10.17487/
RFC5234, January 2008, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5234>.

[RFC7405] Kyzivat, P., “Case-Sensitive String Support in ABNF”, RFC

7405, DOI 10.17487/RFC7405, December 2014, <https://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfc7405>.

[RFC8174] Leiba, B., “Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC

2119 Key Words”, BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May
2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

[TLS13] Rescorla, E., “The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol

Version 1.3”, RFC 8446, DOI 10.17487/RFC8446, August 2018, <https://
www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8446>.

[URI] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, “Uniform Resource

Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax”, STD 66, RFC 3986, DOI 10.17487/
RFC3986, January 2005, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3986>.

[USASCII] American National Standards Institute, “Coded Character

Set -- 7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange”,
ANSI X3.4, 1986.

[Welch] Welch, T., “A Technique for High-Performance Data

Compression”, IEEE Computer 17(6), DOI 10.1109/MC.1984.1659158,
June 1984, <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1659158/>.

13.2. Informative References

[HTTP/1.0] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and H. Frystyk, “Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0”, RFC 1945, DOI 10.17487/RFC1945, May
1996, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1945>.

[Klein] Klein, A., “Divide and Conquer - HTTP Response Splitting,

Web Cache Poisoning Attacks, and Related Topics”, March 2004,
<https://packetstormsecurity.com/papers/general/
whitepaper_httpresponse.pdf>.

[Linhart] Linhart, C., Klein, A., Heled, R., and S. Orrin, “HTTP Request
Smuggling”, June 2005, <https://www.cgisecurity.com/lib/HTTP-
Request-Smuggling.pdf>.

[RFC2045] Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, “Multipurpose Internet Mail

Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies”, RFC
2045, DOI 10.17487/RFC2045, November 1996, <https://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfc2045>.

[RFC2046] Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, “Multipurpose Internet Mail

Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types”, RFC 2046, DOI 10.17487/
RFC2046, November 1996, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2046>.

[RFC2049] Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, “Multipurpose Internet Mail

Extensions (MIME) Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples”, RFC
2049, DOI 10.17487/RFC2049, November 1996, <https://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfc2049>.

[RFC2068] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., and T.
Berners-Lee, “Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1”, RFC 2068, DOI
10.17487/RFC2068, January 1997, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/
rfc2068>.

[RFC2557] Palme, J., Hopmann, A., and N. Shelness, “MIME

Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)”, RFC
2557, DOI 10.17487/RFC2557, March 1999, <https://www.rfc-
editor.org/info/rfc2557>.

[RFC5322] Resnick, P., Ed., “Internet Message Format”, RFC 5322,

DOI 10.17487/RFC5322, October 2008, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/
info/rfc5322>.

[RFC7230] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., “Hypertext Transfer

Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing”, RFC 7230, DOI
10.17487/RFC7230, June 2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/
rfc7230>.

[RFC8126] Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, “Guidelines for

Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs”, BCP 26, RFC 8126,
 DOI 10.17487/RFC8126, June 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/
rfc8126>.

Appendix A. Collected ABNF

In the collected ABNF below, list rules are expanded per Section 5.6.1 of
[HTTP].

BWS = <BWS, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.3>

HTTP-message = start-line CRLF *( field-line CRLF ) CRLF [

message-body ]
HTTP-name = %x48.54.54.50 ; HTTP
HTTP-version = HTTP-name "/" DIGIT "." DIGIT

OWS = <OWS, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.3>

RWS = <RWS, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.3>

Transfer-Encoding = [ transfer-coding *( OWS "," OWS transfer-coding

) ]

absolute-URI = <absolute-URI, see [URI], Section 4.3>

absolute-form = absolute-URI
absolute-path = <absolute-path, see [HTTP], Section 4.1>
asterisk-form = "*"
authority = <authority, see [URI], Section 3.2>
authority-form = uri-host ":" port

chunk = chunk-size [ chunk-ext ] CRLF chunk-data CRLF

chunk-data = 1*OCTET
chunk-ext = *( BWS ";" BWS chunk-ext-name [ BWS "=" BWS chunk-ext-val
] )
chunk-ext-name = token
chunk-ext-val = token / quoted-string
chunk-size = 1*HEXDIG
chunked-body = *chunk last-chunk trailer-section CRLF

field-line = field-name ":" OWS field-value OWS

field-name = <field-name, see [HTTP], Section 5.1>
field-value = <field-value, see [HTTP], Section 5.5>

last-chunk = 1*"0" [ chunk-ext ] CRLF

message-body = *OCTET
method = token

obs-fold = OWS CRLF RWS

obs-text = <obs-text, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.4>
origin-form = absolute-path [ "?" query ]

port = <port, see [URI], Section 3.2.3>

query = <query, see [URI], Section 3.4>

quoted-string = <quoted-string, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.4>

reason-phrase = 1*( HTAB / SP / VCHAR / obs-text )

request-line = method SP request-target SP HTTP-version
request-target = origin-form / absolute-form / authority-form /
asterisk-form

start-line = request-line / status-line

status-code = 3DIGIT
status-line = HTTP-version SP status-code SP [ reason-phrase ]

token = <token, see [HTTP], Section 5.6.2>

trailer-section = *( field-line CRLF )
transfer-coding = <transfer-coding, see [HTTP], Section 10.1.4>

uri-host = <host, see [URI], Section 3.2.2>

Appendix B. Differences between HTTP

and MIME
HTTP/1.1 uses many of the constructs defined for the Internet Message
Format [RFC5322] and Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
[RFC2045] to allow a message body to be transmitted in an open variety
of representations and with extensible fields. However, some of these
constructs have been reinterpreted to better fit the needs of interactive
communication, leading to some differences in how MIME constructs are
used within HTTP. These differences were carefully chosen to optimize
performance over binary connections, allow greater freedom in the use
of new media types, ease date comparisons, and accommodate common
implementations.

This appendix describes specific areas where HTTP differs from MIME.
Proxies and gateways to and from strict MIME environments need to be
aware of these differences and provide the appropriate conversions
where necessary.

B.1. MIME-Version
HTTP is not a MIME-compliant protocol. However, messages can include
a single MIME-Version header field to indicate what version of the MIME
protocol was used to construct the message. Use of the MIME-Version
header field indicates that the message is in full conformance with the
MIME protocol (as defined in [RFC2045]). Senders are responsible for
ensuring full conformance (where possible) when exporting HTTP
messages to strict MIME environments.

B.2. Conversion to Canonical Form

MIME requires that an Internet mail body part be converted to canonical
form prior to being transferred, as described in Section 4 of [RFC2049],
and that content with a type of "text" represents line breaks as CRLF,
forbidding the use of CR or LF outside of line break sequences
[RFC2046]. In contrast, HTTP does not care whether CRLF, bare CR, or
bare LF are used to indicate a line break within content.

A proxy or gateway from HTTP to a strict MIME environment ought to

translate all line breaks within text media types to the RFC 2049
canonical form of CRLF. Note, however, this might be complicated by the
presence of a Content-Encoding and by the fact that HTTP allows the use
of some charsets that do not use octets 13 and 10 to represent CR and
LF, respectively.

Conversion will break any cryptographic checksums applied to the

original content unless the original content is already in canonical form.
Therefore, the canonical form is recommended for any content that uses
such checksums in HTTP.

B.3. Conversion of Date Formats

HTTP/1.1 uses a restricted set of date formats (Section 5.6.7 of [HTTP]) to
simplify the process of date comparison. Proxies and gateways from
other protocols ought to ensure that any Date header field present in a
message conforms to one of the HTTP/1.1 formats and rewrite the date
if necessary.

B.4. Conversion of Content-Encoding

MIME does not include any concept equivalent to HTTP's Content-
Encoding header field. Since this acts as a modifier on the media type,
proxies and gateways from HTTP to MIME-compliant protocols ought to
either change the value of the Content-Type header field or decode the
representation before forwarding the message. (Some experimental
applications of Content-Type for Internet mail have used a media-type
parameter of ";conversions=<content-coding>" to perform a function
equivalent to Content-Encoding. However, this parameter is not part of
the MIME standards.)

B.5. Conversion of Content-Transfer-Encoding

HTTP does not use the Content-Transfer-Encoding field of MIME. Proxies
and gateways from MIME-compliant protocols to HTTP need to remove
any Content-Transfer-Encoding prior to delivering the response message
to an HTTP client.

Proxies and gateways from HTTP to MIME-compliant protocols are

responsible for ensuring that the message is in the correct format and
encoding for safe transport on that protocol, where "safe transport" is
defined by the limitations of the protocol being used. Such a proxy or
gateway ought to transform and label the data with an appropriate
Content-Transfer-Encoding if doing so will improve the likelihood of safe
transport over the destination protocol.

B.6. MHTML and Line Length Limitations

HTTP implementations that share code with MHTML [RFC2557]
implementations need to be aware of MIME line length limitations. Since
HTTP does not have this limitation, HTTP does not fold long lines.
MHTML messages being transported by HTTP follow all conventions of
MHTML, including line length limitations and folding, canonicalization,
etc., since HTTP transfers message-bodies without modification and,
aside from the "multipart/byteranges" type (Section 14.6 of [HTTP]), does
not interpret the content or any MIME header lines that might be
contained therein.

Appendix C. Changes from Previous RFCs

C.1. Changes from HTTP/0.9
Since HTTP/0.9 did not support header fields in a request, there is no
mechanism for it to support name-based virtual hosts (selection of
resource by inspection of the Host header field). Any server that
implements name-based virtual hosts ought to disable support for
HTTP/0.9. Most requests that appear to be HTTP/0.9 are, in fact, badly
constructed HTTP/1.x requests caused by a client failing to properly
encode the request-target.

C.2. Changes from HTTP/1.0

C.2.1. Multihomed Web Servers
The requirements that clients and servers support the Host header field
(Section 7.2 of [HTTP]), report an error if it is missing from an HTTP/1.1
request, and accept absolute URIs (Section 3.2) are among the most
important changes defined by HTTP/1.1.

Older HTTP/1.0 clients assumed a one-to-one relationship of IP

addresses and servers; there was no established mechanism for
distinguishing the intended server of a request other than the IP address
to which that request was directed. The Host header field was introduced
during the development of HTTP/1.1 and, though it was quickly
implemented by most HTTP/1.0 browsers, additional requirements were
placed on all HTTP/1.1 requests in order to ensure complete adoption. At
the time of this writing, most HTTP-based services are dependent upon
the Host header field for targeting requests.

C.2.2. Keep-Alive Connections

In HTTP/1.0, each connection is established by the client prior to the
request and closed by the server after sending the response. However,
some implementations implement the explicitly negotiated ("Keep-
Alive") version of persistent connections described in Section 19.7.1 of
[RFC2068].

Some clients and servers might wish to be compatible with these

previous approaches to persistent connections, by explicitly negotiating
for them with a "Connection: keep-alive" request header field. However,
some experimental implementations of HTTP/1.0 persistent connections
are faulty; for example, if an HTTP/1.0 proxy server doesn't understand
Connection, it will erroneously forward that header field to the next
inbound server, which would result in a hung connection.

One attempted solution was the introduction of a Proxy-Connection

header field, targeted specifically at proxies. In practice, this was also
unworkable, because proxies are often deployed in multiple layers,
bringing about the same problem discussed above.

As a result, clients are encouraged not to send the Proxy-Connection

header field in any requests.

Clients are also encouraged to consider the use of "Connection: keep-

alive" in requests carefully; while they can enable persistent connections
with HTTP/1.0 servers, clients using them will need to monitor the
connection for "hung" requests (which indicate that the client ought to
stop sending the header field), and this mechanism ought not be used
by clients at all when a proxy is being used.

C.2.3. Introduction of Transfer-Encoding

HTTP/1.1 introduces the Transfer-Encoding header field (Section 6.1).
Transfer codings need to be decoded prior to forwarding an HTTP
message over a MIME-compliant protocol.

C.3. Changes from RFC 7230

Most of the sections introducing HTTP's design goals, history,
architecture, conformance criteria, protocol versioning, URIs, message
routing, and header fields have been moved to [HTTP]. This document
has been reduced to just the messaging syntax and connection
management requirements specific to HTTP/1.1.

Bare CRs have been prohibited outside of content. (Section 2.2)

The ABNF definition of authority-form has changed from the more

general authority component of a URI (in which port is optional) to the
specific host:port format that is required by CONNECT. (Section 3.2.3)

Recipients are required to avoid smuggling/splitting attacks when

processing an ambiguous message framing. (Section 6.1)

In the ABNF for chunked extensions, (bad) whitespace around ";" and "="
has been reintroduced. Whitespace was removed in [RFC7230], but that
change was found to break existing implementations. (Section 7.1.1)

Trailer field semantics now transcend the specifics of chunked transfer

coding. The decoding algorithm for chunked (Section 7.1.3) has been
updated to encourage storage/forwarding of trailer fields separately
from the header section, to only allow merging into the header section if
the recipient knows the corresponding field definition permits and
defines how to merge, and otherwise to discard the trailer fields instead
of merging. The trailer part is now called the trailer section to be more
consistent with the header section and more distinct from a body part.
(Section 7.1.2)

Transfer coding parameters called "q" are disallowed in order to avoid

conflicts with the use of ranks in the TE header field. (Section 7.3)

Acknowledgements
See Appendix "Acknowledgements" of [HTTP], which applies to this
document as well.

Index
ACDFGHKLMORTUWX

•A
◦ absolute-form (of request-target) 3.2.2
◦ application/http Media Type 10.2
◦ asterisk-form (of request-target) 3.2.4
◦ authority-form (of request-target) 3.2.3
•C
◦ CACHING 1, 8, 13.1
▪ Section 3.3 8
◦ chunked (Coding Format) 6.1, 6.3
◦ chunked (transfer coding) 7.1
◦ close 9.3, 9.3, 9.3.2, 9.6, 12.1
◦ compress (transfer coding) 7.2
◦ Connection header field 9.3, 9.3.2, 9.6, 12.1
◦ Content-Length header field 6.2
◦ Content-Transfer-Encoding header field B.5
•D
◦ deflate (transfer coding) 7.2
•F
◦ Fields
▪ Close 9.6
▪ MIME-Version 12.1, B.1
 ▪ Transfer-Encoding 6, 6.1, 7, 12.1, C.2.3, C.3
•G
◦ Grammar
▪ absolute-form 3.2, 3.2.2
▪ ALPHA 1.2
▪ asterisk-form 3.2, 3.2.4
▪ authority-form 3.2, 3.2.3
▪ chunk 7.1
▪ chunk-data 7.1
▪ chunk-ext 7.1, 7.1.1
▪ chunk-ext-name 7.1.1
▪ chunk-ext-val 7.1.1
▪ chunk-size 7.1
▪ chunked-body 7.1
▪ CR 1.2
▪ CRLF 1.2
▪ CTL 1.2
▪ DIGIT 1.2
▪ DQUOTE 1.2
▪ field-line 5, 7.1.2
▪ field-name 5
▪ field-value 5
▪ HEXDIG 1.2
▪ HTAB 1.2
▪ HTTP-message 2.1
▪ HTTP-name 2.3
▪ HTTP-version 2.3
▪ last-chunk 7.1
▪ LF 1.2
▪ message-body 6
▪ method 3.1
▪ obs-fold 5.2
▪ OCTET 1.2
▪ origin-form 3.2, 3.2.1
▪ reason-phrase 4
▪ request-line 3
▪ request-target 3.2
▪ SP 1.2
 ▪ start-line 2.1
▪ status-code 4
▪ status-line 4
▪ trailer-section 7.1, 7.1.2
▪ Transfer-Encoding 6.1
▪ VCHAR 1.2
◦ gzip (transfer coding) 7.2
•H
◦ Header Fields
▪ MIME-Version 12.1, B.1
▪ Transfer-Encoding 6, 6.1, 7, 12.1, C.2.3, C.3
◦ header line 2.1
◦ header section 2.1
◦ headers 2.1
◦ HTTP 1, 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2,
2, 2.3, 3, 3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3, 3.2.4, 3.3, 3.3, 4, 5, 6, 6,
6.1, 6.1, 6.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.2, 6.3, 7, 7.1.2, 7.2, 7.2, 7.2, 7.3, 7.3, 7.4,
7.4, 7.4, 7.4, 9, 9, 9.2, 9.3, 9.3.1, 9.3.2, 9.3.2, 9.6, 11, 11.4, 12.1,
12.3, 13.1, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, B.3, B.6, C.2.1, C.3,
"Acknowledgements"
▪ Section 4.1 A
▪ Section 5.1 A
▪ Section 5.5 A
▪ Section 5.6.2 A
▪ Section 5.6.3 A, A, A
▪ Section 5.6.4 A, A
▪ Section 10.1.4 A
▪ Section 2 1.1
▪ Section 2.3 3
▪ Section 2.5 2.3
▪ Section 3 2
▪ Section 4.1 1.2
▪ Section 4.2 3.2
▪ Section 4.2.1 9
▪ Section 4.2.2 11.4
▪ Section 5.1 1.2
▪ Section 5.5 1.2, 5
▪ Section 5.6.1 1.2, 6.3, A
▪ Section 5.6.2 1.2
 ▪ Section 5.6.3 1.2, 1.2, 1.2
▪ Section 5.6.4 1.2, 1.2
▪ Section 5.6.7 B.3
▪ Section 6.4 6
▪ Section 6.4.1 6
▪ Section 6.5 7.1.2, 7.4
▪ Section 7.1 3.3
▪ Section 7.2 3.2, 3.2.1, C.2.1
▪ Section 7.3 9
▪ Section 7.4 3.3
▪ Section 7.6 3.2.2
▪ Section 7.6.1 7.4, 9.3, 9.6
▪ Section 8.4.1 6.1, 7.3
▪ Section 8.4.1.1 7.2
▪ Section 8.4.1.2 7.2
▪ Section 8.4.1.3 7.2
▪ Section 8.6 6.2, 6.2
▪ Section 9 3.1
▪ Section 9.2.1 9.3.2
▪ Section 9.2.2 9.3.1, 9.3.2
▪ Section 9.3.6 3.2.3, 6.1
▪ Section 9.3.7 3.2.4
▪ Section 10.1.4 1.2, 6.1, 7, 7.3, 7.4, 12.3
▪ Section 12.4.2 7.4
▪ Section 14.6 B.6
▪ Section 15 4
▪ Section 15.2 9.2
▪ Section 15.4.5 6.1
▪ Section 15.5.15 3
▪ Section 18.4 12.1
▪ Acknowledgements "Acknowledgements"
◦ HTTP/1.0 2.3, 13.2
•K
◦ Klein 11.1, 13.2
•L
◦ Linhart 11.2, 13.2
•M
◦ Media Type
 ▪ application/http 10.2
▪ message/http 10.1
◦ message/http Media Type 10.1
◦ method 3.1
◦ MIME-Version header field 12.1, B.1
•O
◦ origin-form (of request-target) 3.2.1
•R
◦ request-target 3.2
◦ RFC1950 12.3, 13.1
◦ RFC1951 12.3, 13.1
◦ RFC1952 12.3, 13.1
◦ RFC2045 2.1, 6.1, 13.2, B, B.1
▪ Section 6 6.1
◦ RFC2046 13.2, B.2
◦ RFC2049 13.2, B.2
▪ Section 4 B.2
◦ RFC2068 13.2, C.2.2
▪ Section 19.7.1 C.2.2
◦ RFC2119 1.1, 13.1
◦ RFC2557 13.2, B.6
◦ RFC5234 1.2, 1.2, 13.1
▪ Appendix B.1 1.2
◦ RFC5322 2.1, 13.2, B
◦ RFC7230 1, 1, 13.2, C.3
◦ RFC7405 1.2, 13.1
◦ RFC8126 7.3, 13.2
▪ Section 4.8 7.3
◦ RFC8174 1.1, 13.1
•T
◦ TLS13 9.7, 9.8, 13.1
◦ Transfer-Encoding header field 6, 6.1, 7, 12.1, C.2.3, C.3
•U
◦ URI 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, 13.1, A, A, A, A, A
▪ Section 3.2 1.2, A
▪ Section 3.2.2 1.2, A
▪ Section 3.2.3 1.2, A
▪ Section 3.4 1.2, A
 ▪ Section 4.3 1.2, A
◦ USASCII 1.2, 2.2, 13.1
•W
◦ Welch 12.3, 13.1
•X
◦ x-compress (transfer coding) 7.2
◦ x-gzip (transfer coding) 7.2

Authors' Addresses
Roy T. Fielding (editor)
Adobe
345 Park Ave
San Jose, CA 95110
United States of America
Email: fielding@gbiv.com
URI: https://roy.gbiv.com/

Mark Nottingham (editor)

Fastly
Prahran
Australia
Email: mnot@mnot.net
URI: https://www.mnot.net/

Julian Reschke (editor)

greenbytes GmbH
Hafenweg 16
48155 Münster
Germany
Email: julian.reschke@greenbytes.de
URI: https://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/