- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 20:21:24 PST
- To: Yaron Goland <yarong@microsoft.com>
- CC: "'Steve Carter'" <SRCarter@gw.novell.com>, "'w3c-dist-auth@w3.org'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
Byte ranges (in HTTP range retrieval) don't apply to resources. They apply to entities. An entity is the data stream that you get when you perform a GET operation. Servers are free to ignore byte range requests and deliver the entire entity rather than the indicated range. Resources don't have "byte ranges". Entities are immutable. They don't change. Since they don't change, it doesn't make sense to lock one or even lock part of one. That's why locking byte ranges doesn't make sense, even though you might think of having one resource which is a particular byte range of another resource and locking _that_. (Yaron, your example is broken because "#" is not a valid character in URLs.)
Received on Thursday, 27 February 1997 00:21:36 UTC