[5699] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: holding connections open: a modest proposal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy T. Fielding)
Mon Sep 19 10:24:25 1994
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 15:16:50 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
> Stealing from PostScript, where the same situation applies (with the Bounding
> Box) when programs are generating the file and writing as they go:
>
> [stuff]
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
> Content-Length: (atend)
> [lots of stuff]
> Content-Length: 12345678
;-) I think you are mixing paradigms here...
PostScript can use the (atend) marker because it has an implicit separator
%%Trailer
which marks where "end" is. The effect is similar to the MIME boundary
separator, though for a different purpose.
> Yes I know this raises other problems, it was just a suggestion.
> Does the program parsing MIME have to know the length at the beginning?
Yes, because what it needs to know is where the end is BEFORE it gets there
(i.e. the Content-Length is used to determine where the message content ends).
Knowing how long the message is AFTER it's been processed is not very useful.
.....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>
