WGLC p1: Delimiting messages with multipart/byteranges

[Ben Niven-Jenkins <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

The p1 HTTPbis draft has removed using multipart/byteranges as a message delimiter in 206 responses (which was previously allowed by RFC2616).

I see this was originally tracked as Ticket #90 and the outcome was to deprecate such behaviour in all cases including in 206 responses with Content-Type: multipart/byteranges (which is the only case I care about).

This decision makes previously conforming implementations (such as our reverse proxy implementation) now non-conformant and the alternatives of: (A) close connection after every multipart/byteranges response or (B) pre-calculate message body length (including header/boundary bytes for each byterange) in advance, are inconvenient.

Would it be possible to re-allow use of multipart/byteranges as a message delimiter in the case where it is a 206 response AND there is no Transfer-Encoding AND there is no Content-Length so that implementations such as ours are classed as conformant again?


Even if it is decided to stick with the current state of affairs in -22 where generating 206 responses that use multipart/byteranges as a delimiter is forbidden, the specification should still specify how to parse such responses in a backwardly compatible manner as generating such responses was previously allowed & used and so User Agents should still expect to receive them from pre-httpbis implementations.

Thanks
Ben