Re: Byte range PATCH

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Am 06.08.2022 um 04:26 schrieb Austin William Wright:
>> On Aug 3, 2022, at 23:56, Julian Reschke <[e-mail]
>> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>
>> Am 03.08.2022 um 22:36 schrieb Austin William Wright:
>>> ...
>>> Hi Julian,
>>>
>>> I don’t have terribly strong opinions about what the format is, but
>>> this is what I thought was obvious based on a few motivations:
>>>
>>> 1. It re-uses an existing parser (it’s an off-the-shelf HTTP-message
>>> but skipping the "start-line CRLF” beginning, and is trivially
>>> parsable with a state machine or regular expression [1]).
>>> ...
>>
>> That parser might be *present* everywhere, but not accessible. For
>> instance, a Java servlet engine happily processes HTTP/1.1 messages, but
>> doesn't provide an API to use that parser directly.
>
> This is indeed an unfortunate state of many Web app environments; but if
> you’re a client, then this format is trivial to generate (ASCII text
> prepended to a binary blob), and if you’re a server, then you likely
> already have access to parsers like multipart/form-data which should be
> similar at the very least.
> ...

"Similar" is not good enough. Existing parsers are likely to be tolerant
in parsing due to existing buggy clients, and if we reuse these parsers
the same problem will leak in here.

Best regards, Julian