Re: Worries about content-length

On Tue, 9 May 1995, Rich Salz wrote:

> >  It is not an
> > unreasonable burden on HTTP servers to require accurate content-length
> 
> It requires that all documents returned by the server by pre-scanned.
> There are apparently often times it is unreasonable.

Sorry, I haven't heard an example yet which doesn't reflect laziness or
poor design.  For the subset of cases where the size isn't known
(e.g., CGI output), data could be delivered in a series of precisely
size computed chunks with the last chunk so marked.

> Which do you prefer?
> 	foo | bar
> 	foo >tmp ; bar <tmp

The burden for the two step process falls on the information provider,
not the network and not the consumer. Performance optimizations can
be applied best at the source.
        foo | bar
is really
        foo | [net] | [ua] > tmp ; < bar.ua