Re: new editorial issue RANGE_WITH_CONTENTCODING
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu)
Fri, 14 Nov 1997 13:18:27 -0800
I have said before that the reason there is both a Content-Encoding
and a Transfer-Encoding is that the former is a property of the
resource and the latter is a transmission issue. The reason I say
this is because the other metadata describing the entity always
describes the entity-body as whole, e.g.,
Content-Encoding( Content-Type( data ) )
so that things like Content-MD5 and Range requests apply to the whole.
>Then should then 100 bytes covered by the Range/Content-Range
>refer to the second hundred bytes of the HTML file before
>compression, or to the second hundred bytes of the compressed
>form?
The compressed form.
>It seems to me that the only reasonable interpretation is that
>Range/Content-Range should apply to the unencoded form of the
>response, since the client's ultimate goal is to obtain a specific
>piece of the unencoded form; the use of compression is only
>a temporary phase that the response goes through while it is
>being transmitted.
This would assume the part of the server performing the range
has access to the non-compressed data, which is false.
....Roy