- From: John Franks <john@math.nwu.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 20:11:44 -0500 (CDT)
- To: cshotton@biap.com (Chuck Shotton)
- Cc: luotonen@netscape.com, www-talk@w3.org, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com, uri@bunyip.com
According to Chuck Shotton: > > >Description of the byterange URL Parameter > > > > * The byte range request is attached to the end of the URL, > > separated by a semi-colon. > > Why not use the already supported "?" separator? Many file systems use the > semi-colon character to represent version numbers and overloading this > character could cause difficulties. In effect, you are asking the server to > "search" for a specific byte range in a document anyway, so it's not too > big of a stretch to adopt the "?" safe character instead of risking > possible conflicts with ";". > I see a potential problem with using '?' because it is already used for forms. What happens if someone has a form with a field named "byterange"? We are better off having the name space for form fields separate from that of URL parameters. > > Please. Let's not expand on this. It forces servers to have a much more > intimate knowledge of the content they serve than is necessary. Let's > define how byte ranges work and leave the nasty WWW object model for > another day and another syntax. I generally agree with this, though I might not have put it so strongly. On the other hand it is fine for servers to implement server specific parameters with special meaning for that server. There are a number of such in the server that I wrote. If, as in the case of byterange, it turns out that several implementors want the same functionality it makes sense to try to standardize. John Franks
Received on Wednesday, 17 May 1995 21:14:14 UTC