Re: Section 14.36 Range, and PUTs

> Section 14.36 says that support for Range is optional. For clients I
> agree, but I think that for servers there's a problem with Range and
> PUT. If a client sends a PUT with a Range:, and the server doesn't
> support Range:, then the whole entity will be clobbered.

How so?

> It would be better if 1.1 servers had to at least recognize Range and
> produce an error message on methods other than GET if they don't support
> the Range retrieval semantics. (This includes unrecognized range-units
> -- see my previous message).
> 
> Proposal:
> 
> Change
> 
> (However, not all clients and servers need to support byte-range
> operations.)
> 
> to
> 
> Clients MAY support byte-range operations. Servers MAY ignore Range
> headers on GET requests, and on all other methods MUST either support
> byte-range operations or return a 501 (Not Implemented) error if the
> request contains a Range header or a range-unit that the server does not
> recognize.

I think you are missing something.  Range is a request header that
applies to the entity returned as the result of the request.  I could
understand sending Content-Range in a PUT request (which would have
the effect of putting just a range of an entity), though I wouldn't
suggest it for 1.1.


 ...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, 1 June 1996 03:07:01 UTC