14.19 Date

The Date general-header field represents the date and time at which the message was originated, having the same semantics as orig-date in RFC 822. The field value is an HTTP-date, as described in section 3.3.1.

          Date  = "Date" ":" HTTP-date

An example is

          Date: Tue, 15 Nov 1994 08:12:31 GMT

If a message is received via direct connection with the user agent (in the case of requests) or the origin server (in the case of responses), then the date can be assumed to be the current date at the receiving end. However, since the date--as it is believed by the origin--is important for evaluating cached responses, origin servers MUST include a Date header field in all responses. Clients SHOULD only send a Date header field in messages that include an entity- body, as in the case of the PUT and POST requests, and even then it is optional. A received message which does not have a Date header field SHOULD be assigned one by the recipient if the message will be cached by that recipient or gatewayed via a protocol which requires a Date.

In theory, the date SHOULD represent the moment just before the entity is generated. In practice, the date can be generated at any time during the message origination without affecting its semantic value.

The format of the Date is an absolute date and time as defined by HTTP-date in section 3.3; it MUST be sent in RFC1123 [8]-date format.