it would be cool if there was a way to do the equivalent of an http HEAD request, but for html documents

thinking about this again

i would guess it depends on the web server to do that kind of preprocessing before responding to a HEAD request, but idk how feasible this is. it makes sense mostly for dynamic server responses where the http message is being generated on-the-fly but for static servers you probably need some dynamic component that "reaches in" and grabs the appropriate tags in head and converts them to http headers.