- From: John A. Kunze <jak@violet.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 18:02:46 -0700
- To: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com, luotonen@netscape.com, www-talk@w3.org
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
> From: Ari Luotonen <luotonen@netscape.com> > Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 13:22:40 -0700 (PDT) > ... The proposal in general sounds pretty reasonable to me. It's not unlike fragment proposals submitted for other applications (eg, Z39.50), but I think the timing and especially the simplicity of this one favors it. > The following HTTP response header is sent back to provide > verification and information about the range and total size of the file: > > Range: bytes X-Y/Z Without getting much more complicated, you might want to handle the case when the server doesn't know the size, as when a file is growing. Multiple ranges make me a little squeamish because you have to think about packaging ranges in the (single) response. For example, do you concatenate all the returned ranges, and let the client count bytes to figure out where range boundaries are? (Things get weird fast when you move beyond bytes into, say, paragraphs.) If you stick with multiple ranges you might let the server be pig-headed about them and return them in the order that's most convenient. Good taste dictates that it will do what's requested, but offers protection from some pathological cases. Reliability can be assured if the header reports back to the client what the server ended up doing. -John =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John A. Kunze 510-642-1530 Information Systems and Technology Fax: 510-643-5385 293 Evans Hall Internet: jak@violet.berkeley.edu Berkeley, CA 94720 or jak@nlm.nih.gov =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Received on Wednesday, 17 May 1995 21:05:29 UTC