Re: Coalescing ranges

On 25/07/2015 10:29 p.m., Mark Nottingham wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The thing to keep in mind here is that just because the spec says you MAY do something, it doesn't imply that you MUST NOT do other things. I.e., we do not operate under "anything which is not expressly allowed is forbidden" rules. 
> 
> I agree that this could be written a bit more clearly; the normative MAY is somewhat spurious here.
> 

That was to avoid problems like the interpretation we came up with for
Squid years back. That the coalescing was not expressly permitted, so we
could reject it. That led to problems with some software using Squid and
oter clients following the same line of reasoning.

With MAY, we can clearly see that clients need to be able to handle
combined ranges back from the server. Clients that don't can have the
RFC thrown at their devs.

I was and still am in preference for inverting the requirement so it
becomes a "MUST be able to handle" type requirement on client instead of
a MAY on servers. But what we have is what was compromised.

Amos

Received on Saturday, 25 July 2015 11:49:28 UTC