Request header - MDN Web Docs Glossary: Definitions of Web-related terms 编辑

A request header is an HTTP header that can be used in an HTTP request to provide information about the request context, so that the server can tailor the response. For example, the Accept-* headers indicate the allowed and preferred formats of the response. Other headers can be used to supply authentication credentials (e.g.  Authorization, to control caching, or to get information about the user agent or referrer, etc. 

Not all headers appearing in a request are referred to as request headers by the specification. For example, the Content-Length header (which indicates the size of the message body) is referred to as an entity header in older versions of the specification and as representational metadata in more recent versions.

In addition, CORS defines a subset of request headers as simple headers, request headers that are always considered authorized and are not explicitly listed in responses to preflight requests.

The HTTP message below shows a few request headers after a GET request:

GET /home.html HTTP/1.1
Host: developer.mozilla.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Referer: /wiki/testpage.html
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:36:04 GMT
If-None-Match: "c561c68d0ba92bbeb8b0fff2a9199f722e3a621a"
Cache-Control: max-age=0

Learn more

Technical knowledge

• List of all HTTP headers
• RFC 7231, section 5: Request header fields