14.11 Content-Base The Content-Base entity-header field may be used to specify the base URI for resolving relative URLs within the entity. This header field is described as Base in RFC 1808, which is expected to be revised. Content-Base = "Content-Base" ":" absoluteURI If no Content-Base field is present, the base URI of an entity is defined either by its Content-Location (if that Content-Location URI is an absolute URI) or the URI used to initiate the request, in that Fielding, et. al. Standards Track [Page 109] RFC 2068 HTTP/1.1 January 1997 order of precedence. Note, however, that the base URI of the contents within the entity-body may be redefined within that entity-body. 14.12 Content-Encoding The Content-Encoding entity-header field is used as a modifier to the media-type. When present, its value indicates what additional content codings have been applied to the entity-body, and thus what decoding mechanisms MUST be applied in order to obtain the media-type referenced by the Content-Type header field. Content-Encoding is primarily used to allow a document to be compressed without losing the identity of its underlying media type. Content-Encoding = "Content-Encoding" ":" 1#content-coding Content codings are defined in section 3.5. An example of its use is Content-Encoding: gzip The Content-Encoding is a characteristic of the entity identified by the Request-URI. Typically, the entity-body is stored with this encoding and is only decoded before rendering or analogous usage. If multiple encodings have been applied to an entity, the content codings MUST be listed in the order in which they were applied. Additional information about the encoding parameters MAY be provided by other entity-header fields not defined by this specification. 14.13 Content-Language The Content-Language entity-header field describes the natural language(s) of the intended audience for the enclosed entity. Note that this may not be equivalent to all the languages used within the entity-body. Content-Language = "Content-Language" ":" 1#language-tag Language tags are defined in section 3.10. The primary purpose of Content-Language is to allow a user to identify and differentiate entities according to the user's own preferred language. Thus, if the body content is intended only for a Danish-literate audience, the appropriate field is Content-Language: da If no Content-Language is specified, the default is that the content is intended for all language audiences. This may mean that the sender Fielding, et. al. Standards Track [Page 110] RFC 2068 HTTP/1.1 January 1997 does not consider it to be specific to any natural language, or that the sender does not know for which language it is intended. Multiple languages MAY be listed for content that is intended for multiple audiences. For example, a rendition of the "Treaty of Waitangi," presented simultaneously in the original Maori and English versions, would call for Content-Language: mi, en However, just because multiple languages are present within an entity does not mean that it is intended for multiple linguistic audiences. An example would be a beginner's language primer, such as "A First Lesson in Latin," which is clearly intended to be used by an English-literate audience. In this case, the Content-Language should only include "en". Content-Language may be applied to any media type -- it is not limited to textual documents.