Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On 1/4/10 7:26 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> To find out about range request support, the client could do a HEAD
> request and check the Accept-Ranges response header (and yes, it's not
> required to return it, so it would be interesting to check what current
> servers do).

Last I checked what servers do with HEAD requests is screw them up (send 
a response body, send a response with different headers from the headers 
that would get sent with the GET, perform non-idempotent actions in 
response to the HEAD, etc).  This was a few years ago, though.

Firefox had to stop using HEAD as part of its "save link as" process due 
to these issues (it used to use it to try to get the Content-Disposition 
header so as to put up a meaningful filepicker before starting the 
download).

-Boris