Re: v11-03 COMMENT: 16.8 Errors or Incomplete ...

Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com> wrote:
  >     [DMK wrote:]
  > 
  >     In the second paragraph, the phrase "... if the transport connection
  >     was terminated in any unusual way" is too vague to be meaningful.  I'm
  >     unsure what it should say.  (Jeff?)  I think it should at least give
  >     categories of events that qualify as "unusual".
  >     
  > How about
  > 	... if there is any uncertainty as to whether a terminated
  > 	transport connection was terminated without any error.
I suppose that's okay (and acceptably vague :-).

  > [...]
  > On the other hand, the underlying rule is in conflict with our desire
  > to allow a cache to use and support range-retrieval operations to patch
  > up after failed transfers.  (I think I may have already commented on
  > this issue to Jim Gettys, but I don't think he's had a chance to
  > address it in the spec.)  For example, if the transfer of a 100KB
  > entity fails after 99KB, it would be nice to be able to keep those 99KB
  > in the cache, marked in some way as "partial content", and then do a
  > 1KB range retrieval to finish the entity.
  > 
  > So probably the "MUST NOT store the response" in the previous
  > sentence should become "MUST NOT store the response unless
  > it is marked as a partial-content response."  Note, however, that
  > the Content-Range header requires an indication of the total
  > length of the object, so it's not always possible to make use of
  > such a fragmentary response.

Sounds like appropriate adjustments to me.

Dave Kristol

Received on Wednesday, 15 May 1996 07:06:09 UTC