Does your webserver give HEAD?

In the process of constructing a crawler that finds and checks PDF documents on a website I discovered a lot of sites that don’t return information for HEAD requests. A HEAD request should return the same set of HTTP headers as a normal GET request only without the actual payload.

The typical response seem to be status 500 (internal server error) on a lot of IIS sites. So, now is a good time to check your own sites to see what you get back from a:

curl --head http://www.mysite.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 18:01 and is filed under Standards, Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.