Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Wed, 17 May 1995 21:10:57 +0500

In message <199505172022.NAA06472@neon.netscape.com>, Ari Luotonen writes:

A nice, clear, complete proposal. As you say, this could be done as a
server-private mechanism, but there's no reason why everybody
shouldn't do it the same way.

A couple nits:

> * The first byte in file is byte number 1.

Blech. I'd rather it were 0. No biggie.

> MULTIPLE URL PARAMETERS
>
> If at some point there will be multiple simultaneous URL parameters,
> they should be separated by the ampersand character (just like
> multiple values are encoded in the FORM request).

The ampersand character has odd interactions with SGML entity
reference syntax in HTML.

This URL:

http://host/path;param1=val1&param2=val2

has to be written:

<a href="http://host/path;param1=val1&#38;param2=val2">xxx</a>
<a href="http://host/path;param1=val1&amp;param2=val2">xxx</a>

in HTML.

I suggest you separate parameters with ';' in stead:

<a href="http://host/path;param1=val1;param2=val2">xxx</a>

Save everybody a little grief.

Dan