Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems. Personal use only; do not redistribute.

98

Chapter 4 Handling the Client Request: HTTP Request Headers

Figure 4 2

Request headers sent by Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 98.

4.3 HTTP 1.1 Request Headers

Access to the request headers permits servlets to perform a number of opti 

mizations and to provide a number of features not otherwise possible. This

section presents each of the possible HTTP 1.1 request headers along with a

brief summary of how servlets can make use of them. The following sections

give more detailed examples. 

Note that HTTP 1.1 supports a superset of the headers permitted in

HTTP 1.0. For additional details on these headers, see the HTTP 1.1 specifi 

cation, given in RFC 2616. There are a number of places the official RFCs

are archived on line; your best bet is to start at 

http://www.rfc edi 

tor.org/

 to get a current list of the archive sites.

Accept

This header specifies the MIME types that the browser or other client 

can handle. A servlet that can return a resource in more than one format 

Second edition of this book: www.coreservlets.com; Sequel: www.moreservlets.com.

Servlet and JSP training courses by book's author: courses.coreservlets.com.