In HTTP communication, headers are used to pass additional information with requests and responses. Here’s a comparison between response headers and request headers:
Request Headers
- Definition: These are the headers sent by the client (usually a web browser) to the server with an HTTP request.
- Purpose: They carry information about the client and its environment. This can include details like what type of data the client can process, what languages it prefers, and any cookies it might have stored.
Common Examples:
- Accept: Specifies the media types that are acceptable for the response (e.g., text/html, application/json).
- User-Agent: Provides information about the client software initiating the request (e.g., browser type and version).
- Authorization: Contains credentials for authenticating the client with the server.
- Host: Indicates the domain name of the server and, optionally, the TCP port number.
Response Headers
- Definition: These are the headers sent by the server back to the client in response to an HTTP request.
- Purpose: They provide information about the server's response, such as metadata about the returned content and instructions on how to handle it.
Common Examples:
Content-Type: Indicates the media type of the resource (e.g., text/html, image/png).
- Set-Cookie: Sends cookies from the server to be stored on the client.
- Cache-Control: Provides caching directives for both requests and responses (e.g., no-cache, max-age=3600).
- Server: Identifies the software used by the origin server (though this can be hidden for security reasons).
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