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What is the mandatory information a HTTP Request Header must contain ?

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

All that information is in HTTP 1.1 - RFC 2616

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up vote 1 down vote

That is not HTTP header information, it is TCP/IP packet header information.

Port and sequence numbers are used to deliver packets which is at a much lower level than HTTP. HTTP is an application level protocol and its headers don't deal with anything at the packet level.

What are you trying to do or look for?

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You are right, my example above is from a TCP header. Like I said I look for the mandatory absolute minimum required fields a HTTP request header needs to contain like Host, Accept-Encoding, User-Agent, Date, Content-Length, Connection, Authorization – Stephan Kristyn Jul 23 '10 at 18:44
@user49173 Ok, just looked like you were confusing them since you don't mention anything about packet headers in the question. – squillman Jul 23 '10 at 18:45
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up vote 1 down vote

None of the header fields you mention are strictly required. "GET / HTTP/1.0" is a legal HTTP request.

If there's no "Host" header field, you may not get the results you were hoping for if the destination server is a "virtual host" that doesn't have its own IP address to distinguish itself from other virtual hosts. HTTP 1.1 requires the "Host" field.

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up vote 0 down vote

I did a bit research myself and you are right @gbroiles. For Name Based Virtual Hosting a Browser with HTTP 1.1 is required in general. The browsers sends the hostname in the host header and the Web server serves name based virtual hosts if configured.

With older browsers and HTTP 1.0 that is somewhat possible, but you need a workaround like apache's ServerPath Directive. Luckily newer browsers implement extensions when using HTTP 1.0 to ensure sending the host header field.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

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