Re: Byte ranges -- formal spec proposal
Brian Behlendorf (brian@organic.com)
Thu, 18 May 1995 12:42:12 -0700 (PDT)
On Thu, 18 May 1995, David - Morris wrote:
> On Thu, 18 May 1995, John Franks wrote:
> > Two issues have been raised that I would like to hear more discussion
> > on:
> >
> > Should byteranges be 0 based or 1 based. My initial view was that
>
> It really depends on who is providing the values. Only a subset of
> programmers think of the first object in an ordered set as being
> the 0th object. People think of '1' (one) as the first object. If
> there is any expectation that people will enter the values, one
> is the correct choice.
Well, we do have to settle on a standard though, since we're going to
rely proxy servers to reassemble full documents from byte ranges. At
least that was my interpretation of Ari's proposal - the proxy needs to
know if "1-end" means the complete document or not.
Now we get into some other subtleties - can we really reconstruct a
document from its fragments? This seems to be the biggest selling point
of standardizing this whole thing - not only can a proxy that has
byterange 50-100 of a document serve up a request for byterange 60-80,
but if a proxy had 50-100 and 90-120, it could conceivably service a
request for 80-110 (*only* if the last-modified times matched though).
Okay, so doing this for byteranges isn't a big leap conceptually, but
what about for the other fragments proposed? Can we do a similar
composition for lines, for paragraphs, for words? Will "paragraph 3"
promise to be everything up to "paragraph 4"? I guess this is a quality
of implementation issue.
Something in the back of my head is screaming "Hytime".
Brian
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