Re: Comments on Byte range draft

Gavin Nicol wrote:
> 
> >You and Larry are looking at this problem with blinders on.
> >There are many more uses for byterange URL's than simply
> >PDF files.  For instance Netscape 2.0 uses byteranges to
> >request parts of files that it didn't get the last time
> >you came to a page.
> 
> And then you have to reparse the entire document again, and re-render
> it, possibly ignoring the errors caused by the file being
> incomplete. This is great for small pages, but if you try fetching
> small peices of a 5MB document, it makes no sense.

What makes you think it makes no sense.  An If-modified-since
request can guarantee that the object hasn't changed.  From
there it's just a simple matter of requesting the parts that
are missing. 

> 
> Byte ranges are a lazy replacement for a general naming mechanism.

What's your naming scheme for JPEG files?  How about AVI
video streams?  Bytes are already a general purpose naming scheme,
and they have been used for a number of years.  There is no
need to invent another one.

:lou
-- 
Lou Montulli                 http://www.netscape.com/people/montulli/
       Netscape Communications Corp.

Received on Monday, 13 November 1995 14:39:25 UTC