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Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal

From: Linus Upson <lupson@via.net>
Date: Thu, 18 May 95 23:23:03 -0700
Message-Id: <9505190623.AA05732@via.net>
To: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
Cc: cshotton@biap.com, luotonen@netscape.com, brian@organic.com, dwm@shell.portal.com, john@math.nwu.edu, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com 
Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com> writes:
> It is most unlikely that anyone, or anything, could specify an
> arbitrary byte range from an HTML document, and end up with
> something legal (ie. displayable by itself).

It gets even worse when you consider non-ASCII character encodings.  
 Given just a chunk of bytes, you might not even be able to figure  
out what characters those bytes map to.  And what about servers  
which can vend the same document in multiple character encodings?   
If I have a document stored in UTF-8 and can vend it in ShiftJIS or  
EUC depending on the Accept-Charset: parameter, it seems that  
"byterange" as part of a URL for this document is not well defined.

Linus Upson
Received on Thursday, 18 May 1995 23:28:59 EDT

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