Re: NEW ISSUE: status of multipart/byteranges

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Jamie Lokier wrote:
> >> Actually no, with neither Transfer-Encoding and Content-Length the
> >> message would be seen as having no body and the type would not affect
> >> the message length, so "If the message uses the media type ..." should
> >> really be "If a response uses the media type". This does not affect
> >> the rest of the issue though.
> >
> >In RFC 2616, section 4.4, no mention is made of "206 responses", only:
> 
> Well the item talks about messages in general, so I took that to suggest
> a Content-Type: multipart/byteranges indicates the presence of a message
> body, but that interpretation is likely incorrect. Without message body,
> section 4.4 does not apply at all.

I think RFC 2616 section 4.4 is intended to apply to all messages, due
to 4.4 item 1.

If you're reading it really closely, there's a contradiction, so the
language could be improved:

   _When_ a message-body is included with a message, the
   transfer-length of that body is determined by one of the following
   (in order of precedence):

    1. Any response message which "MUST NOT" include a message-body (such
       as the 1xx, 204, and 304 responses and any response to a HEAD
       request) is always terminated by the first empty line after the
       header fields, regardless of the entity-header fields present in
       the message.

The first paragraph ("When...") says the remainder of the section only
applies when there's a message body.

But the second paragraph ("1. Any...") applies when there isn't a
message body.

I take this to mean that the text is a little sloppy, is entirely a
description of how to determine the length of _all_ messages after the
headers and blank line, and can't reasonably be interpreted any other
way.

-- Jamie

Received on Monday, 19 November 2007 08:51:55 UTC