[8243] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Masinter)
Sun May 21 21:24:03 1995
Date: Sun, 21 May 1995 20:51:53 +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>
> I said:
> | 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.
> 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.
> Explain every user how to ftp from mirrors?
> We're working on that, but the number of net newbies is growing too fast.
Whether there are a lot of net newbies is irrelevant to the question
of whether the proposal to include byte ranges in URLs is useful.
