Re: Byte ranges

On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Dave Kristol wrote:

> It appears that RFC 2046 (Sect. 5.1.1) treats the CRLF that precedes a
> boundary as *part* of the boundary:
> 
>    The boundary delimiter MUST occur at the beginning of a line, i.e.,
>    following a CRLF, and the initial CRLF is considered to be attached
>    to the boundary delimiter line rather than part of the preceding
>    part.
>    [...]
>    NOTE:  The CRLF preceding the boundary delimiter line is conceptually
>    attached to the boundary so that it is possible to have a part that
>    does not end with a CRLF (line  break).  Body parts that must be
>    considered to end with line breaks, therefore, must have two CRLFs
>    preceding the boundary delimiter line, the first of which is part of
>    the preceding body part, and the second of which is part of the
>    encapsulation boundary.
> 
...
> 
> To me it appears that RFC 2068 conflicts with RFC 2046 in its letter,
> but follows it in the spirit.  I think we need a MIME guru to pass
> judgement.  Or we can add another note to Section 19.4 of the HTTP/1.1
> spec. about this difference beteen HTTP and MIME.
> 

You understand the problem correctly.

I don't think that RFC is specific.  There is no discussion of CRLF.
It gives an example in which all CRLF's are invisible and that is all.
I personally would not want to draw conclusions based on the number of
blank lines in the formating of the spec document! I don't think it is
sufficient to just refer to a MIME RFC either.

I don't care how it is done, but we need to be more precise.

John Franks
john@math.nwu.edu

Received on Tuesday, 2 June 1998 07:25:31 UTC