This is a good question, and the answer is philosophical purity and pragmatism. Philosophically, some people believe that this information should be encapsulated in the HTTP response body, while others believe that they should be able to leverage all of the parts of the HTTP spec including the response headers. Pragmatically, certain environments make it harder or easier to access certain parts of request and response objects, but the lowest common denominator is the body content.
Please see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4949311
Also, Balanced (YC W11): https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/overview#storing-the-u...