Byte Ranges

Sorry about the empty messages; Post Road Mailer-3, me-1.  
   
In light of Jim Gettys' recent appeal for comments on the 1.1 spec, I'd   
like to bring up a topic discussed by Ted Hardie and Jeffrey Mogul on   
25 April 1996:   
   
Section 14.36.1 of draft 7 says that if the last-byte-pos is greater   
than the current length fo the entity-body, it should be taken to be   
one less than the current length of the entity-body in bytes.   
   
While this is tolerant, it is not rigourous.  One (the only?) case   
where this could happen is for a client to make an unconditional   
request for an entity that has changed (i.e., the request would fail if   
it were qualified with the appropriate validator).   
   
As Jeffrey pointed out, the client could make the request conditional   
(if it knew how large the entity is in advance) or omit the   
last-byte-pos (if it didn't know how large the entity is in advance).   
However, in this case, we know the request is in error, so to prevent   
bugs in implementations, I agree with Ted that servers should return   
the entire entity.   
   
I didn't see any response to Ted's proposed change to the wording; does   
no-one else care one way or the other?

Thank You,   
Richard L. Gray

Received on Tuesday, 1 October 1996 14:59:14 UTC