Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal

Carl von Loesch ([email protected])
Sun, 21 May 1995 17:31:35 +0500


| > It has been suggested that byte ranges could be supported by either a new
| > HTTP method or by a new HTTP header. The point of byteranges is to allow
| > HTML anchors to request a range of bytes from a document.

But I prefer the URL method much more, as it makes perfectly sense to
request a part of a binary from an FTP server, or just the signature of
a news posting, or a range in a gopher text file.

I like common syntax ("methods" in OOP).. even if the semantics differ
slightly.. whatever seems applicable sounds like a good choice to me.
I wouldn't want it in the headers.

Larry Masinter typeth:
| Except for the case of extracting individual segments out of larger
| ascii files, though, I'm having trouble thinking of any real examples
| of this, and, in particular, any examples where the documents aren't
| text/plain.

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.

Explain every user how to ftp from mirrors?
We're working on that, but the number of net newbies is growing too fast.

P.S. Don't forget s/byterange/bytes/ ;�)

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