3.11 Entity Tags

Entity tags are used for comparing two or more entities from the same requested resource. HTTP/1.1 uses entity tags in the ETag (section 14.20), If-Match (section 14.25), If-None-Match (section 14.26), and If-Range (section 14.27) header fields. The definition of how they are used and compared as cache validators is in section 13.3.3. An entity tag consists of an opaque quoted string, possibly prefixed by a weakness indicator.

         entity-tag = [ weak ] opaque-tag

         weak       = "W/"
         opaque-tag = quoted-string

A "strong entity tag" may be shared by two entities of a resource only if they are equivalent by octet equality.

A "weak entity tag," indicated by the "W/" prefix, may be shared by two entities of a resource only if the entities are equivalent and could be substituted for each other with no significant change in semantics. A weak entity tag can only be used for weak comparison.

An entity tag MUST be unique across all versions of all entities associated with a particular resource. A given entity tag value may be used for entities obtained by requests on different URIs without implying anything about the equivalence of those entities.