HTTP header glossary page makes overly specific references to HTTP/1.1

[LPardue]

MDN URL

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers

What specific section or headline is this issue about?

The intro section

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

HTTP headers let the client and the server pass additional information with an HTTP request or response. An HTTP header consists of its case-insensitive name followed by a colon (:), then by its value. Whitespace before the value is ignored.

This is overly specific to how HTTP/1.1 formats fields.

In RFC 9110 (HTTP semantics), the definition of HTTP fields has been made more general and then specific serialization concerns have been delegated to each HTTP version document (HTTP/1.1 uses one format, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 use a different one).

What did you expect to see?

We probably want to introduce headers more generally - before then talking about the specifics of how headers are serialized in each HTTP version. This needs some care to ensure it is logically consistent, and that the references to RFCs are directly related to the subject matter.

Do you have any supporting links, references, or citations?

https://httpwg.org is the most canonical source

Do you have anything more you want to share?

Given that this probably needs to incorporate mention of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, it might make sense to do it as part of that project.

One thing that will stick out to developers is that implmentations (browsers, wireshark, curl, servers, etc ) tend to pick a presentation format for HTTP header fields that looks like HTTP/1.1. However, "on the wire" the fields are sent in a potentially different format. By fixing up this page, we'll stumble over that problem and need to take care to present things clearly to the reader.

MDN metadata

Page report details

• Folder: en-us/web/http/headers
• MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers
• GitHub URL: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/web/http/headers/index.md
• Last commit: 1fb2843
• Document last modified: 2022-09-12T20:36:22.000Z