Re: NEW ISSUE: Monitoring Connections text

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007, Adrien de Croy wrote:


> I think chunking uploads plus another optional header (maybe called
> "Chunked-Content-Length" or similar?) would be a good workaround in
> systems where the length is known,  and is needed by the receiver for
> policy reasons yet where chunking is desired for its capability to keep
> a connection alive.  I agree the existing Content-Length header is too
> entangled in the rest of HTTP to use in this case.
>
> Being able to advertise an entitiy content length on chunked transfers
> would be useful in many cases (not just uploads).

I'm really uncomfortable with the notion of two specifications of the
actual lenth. I'd prefer and advice notion or maximum notion where the
request or response could have a "Maximum-Length" or "Estimated-Length"
header to provide the recipient with resource management information
while not being an explicit conflict with the actual length sent via
chunked encoding.

Also, I thing the notion of a chunk length of -1 deserves further
discusion. Seems to me that if a recipient understands the new value as
abort, then the connection can continue to be used. If the recipient
doesn't understand the signal, it should be treated as a serious error
resulting in an abort of the request and connection. If I've not missed
something, that leaves older recipients protected while allowing a useful
tweak to the protocol.

Dave Morris

Received on Thursday, 22 November 2007 02:32:26 UTC