A question about headers (and cookies)

Can anyone explain exactly why the headers returned with an HTTP request must be followed by two newlines for the page to render properly? i tried to set a cookie with the following headers:

"HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n
MIME-Version: 1.0\n
Content-Type: text/html\n
Set-Cookie:  data=value"

(newlines listed explicitly) The page returned correctly in Internet Explorer on my home system. All Netscape Navigator got was the result of [ad_footer], as did IE at work. After looking at the ReturnHeaders code, i tried adding some newlines at the end:

"HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n
MIME-Version: 1.0\n
Content-Type: text/html\n
Set-Cookie:  data=value\n\n"

This works exactly as it should. This requirement is very subtle in pages like quotations.tcl. Why exactly does it work like this?

-- david bessire, May 20, 2000

Answers

Redirect: are two consecutive newlines the accepted delimiter for the end of the HTTP headers?

-- david bessire, May 20, 2000

In a word, yes. Two newlines are the delimiter between the headers and the body. It's somewhere in RFC2068 if you want more details.

-- Nick Strugnell, July 19, 2000