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Re: Comments on Byte range draft

From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 19:33:26 -0800
To: Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>
Cc: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, montulli@mozilla.com, ari@netscape.com, john@math.nwu.edu, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Message-Id: <9511111933.aa09098@paris.ics.uci.edu>
> 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/
Received on Saturday, 11 November 1995 19:37:49 UTC

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