Re: holding connections open: a modest proposal

Rick Troth (TROTH@UA1VM.UA.EDU)
Mon, 19 Sep 94 09:55:34 CDT


>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

That's an interesting theft.

>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? Is it OK to know
>it later on, check against how many bytes were recieved, and detect it has got
>them all?

Iff you can somehow switch back to "header interpretation" mode.
You've got to use some kind of boundary or delimiter. Otherwise the
"Content-Length: 12345678" will be seen as just more of the data. :-(

I addressed this problem when creating something I call
Sender Initiated File Transfer. I didn't want to use a second stream,
but couldn't always know ahead of time how big the file would be,
so I sent things in "segments" (bursts), x number of bytes at a time.
But that's not HTTP. :-(

>--
>Chris

--
Rick Troth, <rmtroth@aol.com>, <troth@ua1vm.ua.edu>, Houston, Texas, USA