holding connections open: oh, well

Dave Kristol (dmk@allegra.att.com)
Wed, 14 Sep 94 14:19:03 EDT

A couple of people have beat into my feeble brain the show-stopper
problem with my modest proposal: not all servers reliably return
Content-Length in response to each GET. Therefore clients rely on
getting EOF (i.e., a dropped connection) to know when they've gotten
everything. Which means, therefore, that servers can't hold open a
connection, or the client will keep waiting until it times out.

So, with apologies to all for the chatter and bandwidth, I withdraw my
modest proposal. (Gee, it seemed like such a good idea at the time.)

Dave Kristol