Instructions
Basically, just enter a URL and then click the Submit button. The fine print follows...
- URL:
Must begin with http:// ; we don't do secure servers.
- Request Type:
- GET, the default, shows both the header and content.
- HEAD shows only the header -- a good choice if that's all you care about, or if you anticipate a very large amount of content.
- TRACE is of limited interest -- it just reiterates the request.
- Version:
The HTTP version may influence the server's response.
HTTP/1.1 is the more modern version.
Note that when you use HTTP/1.1 the server may respond with "chunked" data
(indicated by Transfer-Encoding: chunked in the header)
where the complete response is broken up into smaller chunks.
- Display Format:
- Auto-Detect, the default, looks at the Content-Type line in the header and chooses what it thinks is the appropriate display type.
- Text forces text display, which is suitable for HTML files.
- Hex forces hexadecimal display, which would be more appropriate for image files.
- User-Agent:
This is optional.
Sometimes a remote server may return a different response depending on the client or
browser that initiated the request. If you don't specify a user-agent identification
string, we will copy the one that your current browser uses.
- Referer:
(Yes, this is misspelled -- it should be "referrer".
See origin of the term referer.)
Also optional.
Tells the server the URL from which the requested URL was obtained.
The server may respond differently to a request depending on the referring resource.
It also allows a server to generate lists of back-links to
resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete
or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance. The referer field should NOT be
sent if the requested URL was obtained from a source that does not have its own
URL, such as input from the user keyboard.
- Accept-Encoding:
Also optional. This header is sometimes used to specify that the browser
is willing to accept certain formats in the server's response.
An example would be compress, gzip .
- Auto-Follow Location: If the server returns a Location: line in the HTTP header, it instructs your browser to "forward" or "redirect" itself to that new location. If this option is selected, HttpView will automatically continue to query such new locations (up to a maximum of 4 times).