RE: What is Content-Length?

> ----------
> From: 	David W. Morris[SMTP:dwm@xpasc.com]
> Sent: 	Friday, December 12, 1997 2:34 PM
> > 
> > 	If a message is sent on a persistent connection using
> > 	a transfer-coding that does not exactly preserve the
> > 	length of the data being encoding, then the "chunked"
> > 	transfer-coding MUST be used, and MUST be the last
> > 	transfer-coding applied.
> 
> Sounds like a complete solution to me.  Of course, I think there
> might still be a few words about content-length to bring into
> alignment.
> 
There's a problem -- if no one implements any transfer coding other than
identity or chunked, then we don't have the necessary two implementations to
go to Draft.  If they do, then I'll be they don't follow this rule -- they
probably believe that Content-length is the length of the message body, not
the entity-body.

I also don't like having to impose chunked when it isn't needed. If a cache
recieves a .txt file, and gzips it for later use in serving it to clients,
it perfectly well knows the length, and can send it out with a TE of gzip
and a Content-length (or Transfer-length, if we want to introduce that and
get it implemented twice).

Paul

Received on Saturday, 13 December 1997 12:14:31 UTC