Re: Question on byte ranges

Jeffrey Mogul wrote:
> [...]
> So, based as before on the Robustness Principle, and especially given
> the general lack of definitive statements about this kind of problem
> in the HTTP/1.1 spec, that we're better off with servers ignoring
> malformed non-mandatory headers, rather than sending status-400
> responses.
> [...]

That gets to my point, which John Franks didn't quite get right.

My remark was, Why send a 416 in response to a well-formed header (whose
byte-range-spec is unsatisfiable), but respond with 200 to a malformed
header?  Why the distinction, in other words?  The Robustness Principle
would argue against the 416 response, too, wouldn't it?  Surely the
Content-Length or equivalent would be enough to clue the recipient that
the byte-range-spec was unsatisfiable.

Dave Kristol