In the context of http, we have HEAD, but we don't have something DATAHEAD, or METADATA, which would ask the server to provide you what _it_ thinks is the relevant metadata for the endpoint in question. You can fake this by streaming data, or using something like `Content-Range` _if_ you already know what _you_ think the incoming data is, but this means that the consumer has to already know what it is expecting, which kind of defeats one of the purposes of metadata. For example it would be great to be able to send a METADATA request to a url for a zip file and have the server send you back just the central directory (why did they put the central directory at the _end_ of the file?? -> edit: answer: because it was created at a time when you wanted to write the zipped data to disk in a stream so you wouldn't actually know what you had until the end, optimized for writing, duh).