Re: Comments on Byte range draft

> Or a new HTTP method, as Roy Fielding suggested. But it seems to me that, 
> looking at how Netscape Navigator 2.0 actually uses said byte ranges, 
> there's a better solution. Namely, it uses them to get parts of PDF 
> files, or to resume file transfers if disrupted. In each case, if the 
> server does not understand the byte range, the web browser will respond 
> with another request, one without the byte ranges. So why not cause this 
> to be the default behavior, by adding a request header, something like 
> 
> Request-Range: bytes=500-999

Because it screws up caching by hierarchical proxies.

Asking for a partial GET changes the meaning of the header fields returned
in the response, which in turn requires that we either use a different
method or a different status code.   Hmmmmm... what would be the effect
of adding "205 Partial Content"?

 ...Roy T. Fielding
    Department of Information & Computer Science    (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
    University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425    fax:+1(714)824-4056
    http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/