Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Sun, 21 May 1995 20:47:49 +0500


> I said:

> | Except for the case of extracting individual segments out of larger
> | ascii files, though, I'm having trouble thinking of any real examples
> | of this, and, in particular, any examples where the documents aren't
> | text/plain.

> and Carl von Loesch <Carl.von.Loesch@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de> replied:

> Ever tried to download netscape from overseas?

> And no, I don't want to explain every netscape user how to download using
> ftp and REGET, as it would circumvent any hope of having the stuff cached
> by the WWW proxies.

which might be a clever rejoinder, except that the proposal doesn't
actually solve the problem. That is, this is not a proposal for
finishing a partial transmission when the original transmission
failed, and there doesn't seem to be any practical way to use URL byte
ranges to implement retransmission after failure.

> Explain every user how to ftp from mirrors?
> We're working on that, but the number of net newbies is growing too fast.

Whether there are a lot of net newbies is irrelevant to the question
of whether the proposal to include byte ranges in URLs is useful.