Range requests and content encoding

RFC 7233 does not mention content encoding at all.  Same for transfer
encoding.  I assume that is because this is completely unspecified and
therefore completely unreliable, however, for my sanity...

My reading is that a 206 response includes ranges of the encoded
message, and that the content-encoding applies to the complete message
body prior to being split into ranges.  Thus, if I had a "x2" content
encoding that turned "Hello World!" into "HHeelllloo  WWoorrlldd!!",
asking for bytes 3-5 would get you "eel" and not "llo".

The text in Section 4.1 suggests that you would not include a
Content-Encoding header field if the client used If-Range on the
expectation that they already know.  That seems pretty dangerous, but
it's consistent with the idea that you are repairing a larger message.

On the other hand, I have to assume that a Transfer-Encoding applies
*after* the range request.

p.s., I've opened https://github.com/httpwg/http11bis/issues/11 for this.

Received on Tuesday, 22 December 2015 02:29:00 UTC