Re: Byte ranges

For what it's worth: I'm pretty sure I was the one who wrote
the example for the multipart/byteranges in the HTTP/1.1 spec.

I'm *very* sure that I knew (and know) nothing about MIME rules,
nor have I ever read RFC2046.  Since I knew that I was ignorant,
I asked a few MIME experts to check the specification and the
example, and left it at that.  (I can't remember who I asked,
so I won't try to assign any blame for not spotting the ambiguity.)

And, as John Franks alludes, the formatting of the document
has been somewhat at the whim of a well-known (and somewhat
unpredictable) word procesing program, so it's not at all
clear whether whatever example was originally written is the
one that now appears in the draft.  (However, I don't think
this one has been changed.)

Bottom line: we should not be putting too much weight on this
specific example.  If the text of the HTTP/1.1 spec is ambiguous,
we need to fix that.  Then we can revise the example to match
the text, perhaps with a note to be cautiously liberal about accepting
multipart/byteranges with unexpected numbers of CRLFs.

And with a note to the RFC editor to be careful about the formatting
of the example :-)

-Jeff

Received on Tuesday, 2 June 1998 12:27:21 UTC