Re: Comments on Byte range draft

I'm not going to say if I think byte ranges as presented here are A
Good Thing or A Bad Thing (since there seem to be some valid arguments
on both sides), but I would like to suggest that it might be
considerably safer if there was a standard way the client could
include in the request the last-modified date, or a checksum of the
whole document, that it last received in connection with the original
fragment of the document that it received.  Then servers too could
help to keep things in sync, in particular by returning an error
status if the request and some available version of the document don't
match up.  Except for a request for an initial fragment of a
not-yet-seen document, clients should probably always include this
information.

Regarding certain other parts of this discussion I have not really
read too thoroughly, the byte range should be defined in
terms of the *server's* original byte numbering, before any
end-of-line processing, double-byte character conversion, or whatever.
And intermediates shouldn't do any such processing.  Or else this is doomed.

Shel Kaphan

Received on Sunday, 12 November 1995 14:34:25 UTC