Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal

Chuck Shotton (cshotton@biap.com)
Thu, 18 May 1995 14:29:16 +0500


At 8:44 AM 5/18/95, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>I do not like the idea of byte ranges being part of a URL.
>In DynaWeb for example
>
> http://www.ebt.com/collection/readers?byterange=1-500
>
>is absolutely meaningless, because the actual file size is not
>related to the size of the documents retrieved. Worse even,
>there are cases (and DynaWeb is one) where a single URL
>can possibly reference documents that differ in an
>arbitrary manner.
>
>In other words, byte ranges are not generally applicable to
>all objects accessible via a URL, so we cannot make this
>a requirement.

I guess I don't see a problem here. If byte ranges don't apply to data
stored in your server, why would you ever have to worry about URLs
requesting them? Why should your server ever receive them, and why
shouldn't it just ignore them?

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Chuck Shotton
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cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu "I am NOT here."