- From: John Franks <john@math.nwu.edu>
- Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 08:29:00 -0600 (CST)
- To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
According to Adam Dingle: > In HTTP 1.0 there seems to be no way to retrieve a given > part of a document, e.g. bytes 1500000 through 1600000 of > a long binary file. This seems to be an important > limitation, but I haven't seen any discussion of adding > the capability for partial document retrieval to the next > version of HTTP, so I thought I'd bring it up here. > > I would be very interested to hear any comments about this. > Some of the capability you discusss has been in the WN server since its beginning and in it predecessor GN. With the WN server, for example, the URLs http://host/dir/foo;bytes=15000-25000 and http://host/dir/foo;lines=256-1024 request the corresponding byte and line ranges of file foo. The lines version is only allowed for files of type text/*. The content-type is often changed. E.g. a line range from a text/html file is given content type text/plain. This has more uses than you might expect, primarily with text/plain files. See <URL:http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/docs/utility.html#digest>. See <URL:http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/> for more information about WN. John Franks
Received on Wednesday, 8 March 1995 06:37:44 UTC