- From: Albert Lunde <albert-lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 18:25:29 CST
- To: dfab@cinenet.net
- Cc: www-html@w3.org
>
> I wanted to run this by you all, to see if it's feasible. It would be
> easy and very effective.
>
> I was considering adding to the existing "news:" URL, such that it would
> allow links to a particular byte range within the body of a given post.
> It would be something like this:
>
> news:<message-id>@host/243-300
>
HTTP 1.1 provides for byte-ranges within an HTTP request, but not
within a URL. There are serious technical questions as to what
it means to link to a byte-range of a file, for MIME types other
than plain text. (An arbitrary byte-range section of,say,
an HTML or PDF file is not a complete document, in general.)
I think there are servers like John Franks wn server than in effect
define special URLs that refer to byte ranges (for example
to reference one article in a mailbox) but they do this in a way
that treats the URL as an arbitrary token needing no special
processing by the client.
If you are doing server-specific hacks it might make more
sense to use the nntp: or http: schemes to serve up articles
since the news: scheme in effect assumes any news server is
as good as any other.
--
Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu
Received on Monday, 10 March 1997 19:25:24 UTC