I’m now at over 40 posts and the streak is at 46. Not a bad difference considering some of the days I had trying to keep the streak alive but not enough time to write about it. The home page is getting kind of long, so in addition to the archive I’m trying to get working, I think I need to also incorporate a paginate, although the newest gem for Jekyll apparently doesn’t work with GitHub Pages. I’ll have to add that to the list of things to get sorted. Now as Zaphod and Ford say - to business.
Headers
Headers are additional bits of data you can send to the web server when making requests. No headers are strictly required by HTTP but it’s difficult to view a page properly with them.
Common request headers:
Host - Some web servers host multiple websites, so by providing the host header you can specify the one you want, otherwise you receive the default site
User-Agent - Browser software and version number to help the server format the website properly for your browser, and whether to provide browser specific HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
Content-Length - Provides a completeness check for the server to make sure it receives all data being sent for things like forms
Accept-Encoding - Tells the server what compression methods are accepted by the browser to make data smaller for transmitting
Cookie - Data sent to the server to help remember your information
Common response headers:
Set-Cookie - Information to store that gets sent back to server with each request
Cache-Control - How long to store response content in the browser cahce before requesting again
Content-Type - Tells client what type of data is being returned (HTML, CSS, JS, images, video, PDF, etc.) helping the broswer to process the data
Content-Encoding - What method of compression was used to send data
The Questions
Three questions about what header is used in what situation.