[8229] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Masinter)
Thu May 18 17:04:08 1995
Date: Thu, 18 May 1995 16:35:48 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: masinter@parc.xerox.com
From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
> 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.
This originally sounded like it was a proposal for a new form of URL.
Now, it looks like it is a proposal for a convention among HTTP
servers -- like CGI -- which HTTP server implementations could either
include or not, with the client completely unaware. The only issue is
whether proxy servers might be aware of the convention and deal with
overlapping byte ranges.
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.
