Say you have a list of downloads, and you want to know how big they are. With HEAD and Content-Length, you can know, in a standard fashion, assuming the server

Say you have a list of downloads, and you want to know how big they are. With HEAD and Content-Length, you can know, in a standard fashion, assuming the server tells you. Isn't this basic enough, that you'd want to put it in HTTP? What else would you do? Application-specific file-size queries? Doing a GET and then just closing the connection after headers? That's not pretty!