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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] $http_response_header
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

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Tom Samplonius wrote on 02/12/2014 05:01:
>>
>> Wow, I had no idea that existed; what an incredibly ugly 
>> implementation. Even the name is weird (why "header" singular when it 
>> contains an array of headers?)
>
>   Actually, no.  HTTP responses contain a single header at the 
> protocol level, but contain multiple lines.  At some point, people 
> started to each line a “header”, which is actually more strange.  I 
> think that usage may have originated in PHP, actually.  At this point, 
> common usage supports both “header” and “headers”, though “header” is 
> the more general term.  For comparison, no one refers to the separate 
> fields of a TCP header, as “headers”.

I'm not sure the standards back you up on that, actually: RFC 2616 (the 
old HTTP/1.1 spec obsoleted earlier this year) says:

 > Request (section 5) and Response (section 6) messages use the generic 
message format of RFC 822 [9] for transferring entities
 > (the payload of the message). Both types of message consist of a 
start-line, zero or more header fields (also known as "headers"),
 > an empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF) 
indicating the end of the header fields, and possibly a message-body.

Searching for "header" in RFC 822 (dated 1982!), the first mention is this:

 > The  syntax of several fields of the rigidly-formated
 > ("headers") section is defined in  this  specification;  some of
 > these fields must be included in all messages.

So it looks to me like "HTTP header" has always been a synonym for "HTTP 
header field" basically forever.

The new RFC 7230 uses slightly different wording and references, but 
still takes "header" to mean "header field", not the whole section:

 > All HTTP/1.1 messages consist of a start-line followed by a sequence
 >   of octets in a format similar to the Internet Message Format
 >   [RFC5322]: zero or more header fields (collectively referred to as
 >   the "headers" or the "header section"), an empty line indicating the
 >   end of the header section, and an optional message body.

-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

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