Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal

At 8:51 PM 5/21/95, Larry Masinter wrote:
>> I said:
>> and Carl von Loesch <Carl.von.Loesch@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de>
>>replied:
>
>> Ever tried to download netscape from overseas?
>
>> And no, I don't want to explain every netscape user how to download using
>> ftp and REGET, as it would circumvent any hope of having the stuff cached
>> by the WWW proxies.
>
>which might be a clever rejoinder, except that the proposal doesn't
>actually solve the problem. That is, this is not a proposal for
>finishing a partial transmission when the original transmission
>failed, and there doesn't seem to be any practical way to use URL byte
>ranges to implement retransmission after failure.

Because that is an implementation issue not a specification issue.  If this
specification was in place, I could easily detect an aborted transfer
from within Netscape.  If the partially loaded document was cached and it
was then requested again, I could only ask for the parts that I was
missing (if the server supported the function).

However, as was explained earlier, this wasn't the original intention of
Ari's proposal.  We need to be able to do byte ranges for a number of
reasons (the only publicly announced one being Adobe PDF support).  We,
obviously, would like to make the method of doing this a standard rather
than have 20 different implementations...

-Jon


Jon Mittelhauser (jonm@netscape.com)
Netscape Communications

Received on Monday, 22 May 1995 12:16:44 UTC