Re: issue 85 - range unit extensions

Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
> Mark Nottingham wrote:
> >...
> >Straw-man proposal (not exact text):
> >
> >Range-unit extensions SHOULD NOT be specific to any format. This is 
> >because caches are allowed to combine ranges from multiple responses, 
> >and to serve range requests out of cache; format-specific range units 
> >make it less likely that implementations will be able to do this 
> >(although there may be exceptions, hence the SHOULD NOT). An 
> >informational reference to p6 to highlight this to potential extenders 
> >would be a good idea.
> >...
> 
> Playing the devil's advocate: is there *any* range unit other than 
> "bytes" we can think of that is indeed independent of formats? Right 
> now, I can't think of any.

Since we're playing devil's advocate: to be independent of a subset of
formats, it's easy to imagine e.g. things which are specific to
everything under text/* or application/xml+*.

To be fully format independent, bytes have to be involved.  But there
are some interesting "ranges" such as "all portions of the entity
whose MD5 matches A,B,C,D,E,F,G or H", and other logical ways of
slicing and dicing bytes.  Some of those things are even logically
cachable and mergable.  Since we're playing devil's advocate :-)

-- Jamie