Re: Content-Transfer-Encoding "packet"

Sorry for the delay in responding -- all three of the machines I was
using died on Aug 1 due to separate hardware failures.  Personally, I
think it was a curse brought on by the WG minutes ...

>On Thu, 27 Jul 1995, Roy Fielding wrote:
>> >Note that an almost identical mechanism was proposed for SMTP - I think
>> >it is still one of the "draft-ietf-mailext" drafts.
>> 
>> Yes, I am aware of <draft-ietf-mailext-smtp-binary-07.txt>.  That mechanism
>> uses a series of separate messages (each message given a 1*DIGIT length)
>> to send the binary data.  In other words, it is a stateful message sequence,
>> which is something HTTP doesn't do.  
>
>Could please clarify what you mean by 'series of separate messages' since 
>this terminology doesn't fit my understanding of SMTP chunking. The BDAT 
>command doesn't in any way change data content in the pipe. It's also 
>streamable in the sense that you can have more than on outstanding BDAT 
>chunk pending on the connection.

Ooops, confusing terminology.  SMTP involves sending a series of commands
and getting a series of responses, with many commands per mail message.

HTTP sends one "command" in the form of a message, and gets one response.
So, while the concept is similar (and easily translatable for an
HTTP<->SMTP gateway), they are not "almost identical".

 ....Roy T. Fielding  Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
                      Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
                      (fielding@w3.org)                (fielding@ics.uci.edu)

Received on Sunday, 6 August 1995 17:42:58 UTC