- From: Mark Brown <mbrown@openmarket.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 15:39:42 -0400
- To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
- Cc: mbrown@openmarket.com
In the course of implementing the bytes parameter in Open Market's
WebServer I noticed the following things about the draft:
* "separated by a colon" should read "separated by a semicolon"
* The draft is silent on how the server should respond to a
very large integer parameter, e.g.
http://host/dir/foo;bytes=-123456789012345678901234567890
This might be treated as a syntax error or might be treated as the
largest integer that the server can represent.
* The draft says that large second numbers should be treated as referring
to the end of the document. The draft also says that the first
number must always be less than or equal to the second number.
Suppose that dir/foo is a 1-byte file and the request is
http://host/dir/foo;bytes=9-10
Using the first rule the server transforms the request into
http://host/dir/foo;bytes=9-0
Is this now an error according to the second rule? Or should
the server give some arbitrary response, e.g. return the last
byte of the file?
* My reading is that the characters of the bytes parameter, including
the semicolon, equal sign, minus, and comma, do not need to
be unescaped before interpretation. While this is really a URL
encoding issue rather than a bytes parameter issue, it wouldn't hurt
to clarify this point in the draft.
Mark R. Brown
Open Market Inc.
245 First Street
Cambridge MA 01242
Received on Wednesday, 27 September 1995 12:42:34 UTC