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Re: Worries about content-length

From: David - Morris <dwm@shell.portal.com>
Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 12:14:28 -0700 (PDT)
To: Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org>
Cc: James@osf.org, Gosling <jag@scndprsn.eng.sun.com>, NED@sigurd.innosoft.com, masinter@parc.xerox.com, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.90.950509120620.8693J-100000@jobe.shell.portal.com>


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
Received on Tuesday, 9 May 1995 12:16:40 UTC

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