General header

General header is an outdated term used to refer to an HTTP header that can be used in both request and response messages, but which doesn’t apply to the content itself (a header that applied to the content was called an entity header). Depending on the context they are used in, general headers might either be response or request headers (e.g., Cache-Control).

Note: Current versions of the HTTP/1.1 specification do not specifically categorize headers as “general headers”. These are now simply referred to as response or request headers depending on context.