Manipulating HTTP Headers with htaccess

Apache .htaccess and httpd.conf have the power to send and manipulate HTTP Header Requests and responses like sending P3P privacy headers, Content-Type: UTF-8, Content-Language: en-US, etc. The power is immense and you can do some really cool stuff with HTTP Headers!

Check out my advanced HTTP Header Viewer and Manipulator - Free Online Tool.

Custom HTTP Headers

Any time you see a meta tag of type "http-equiv" you can replace it with a real header in htaccess

100% Prevent Files from being cached

This is similar to how google ads employ the header Cache-Control: private, x-gzip-ok="" to prevent caching of ads by proxies and clients.

<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|js|css)$">
FileETag None
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
Header set Expires "Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT"
</ifModule>
</FilesMatch>

Remove IE imagetoolbar

<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header set imagetoolbar "no"
</ifModule>
</FilesMatch>

Add P3P Privacy Headers to your site

Adding a P3P header to your site is a good idea, do this.

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header set P3P "policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP COR NID CUR ADM DEV OUR BUS""

# OR THIS, SIMPLER
Header set P3P "policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml""
</ifModule>

Add a "en-US" language header and "UTF-8" without meta tags!

Article: Setting Charset in htaccess

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
AddLanguage en-US .html .htm .css .js

Using AddType

AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' .html

Using the Files Directive

Article: Using 'Files' in htaccess

<Files ~ ".(htm|html|css|js)$">
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
DefaultLanguage en-US
</Files>

Using the FilesMatch Directive

Article: Using 'FilesMatch' in htaccess

<FilesMatch "\.(htm|html|css|js)$">
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
DefaultLanguage en-US
</FilesMatch>