IPP> ADM - Minutes from PWG IPP Phone Conference - 98011

[Larry Masinter]

Carl Kugler wrote:
> 
> The weakness with the MIME way is that it's either unsafe or slow -- either you
> arbitrarily pick a boundary string and hope that it doesn't appear in the
> binary data, or you prescan the data to make sure.  Content-length avoids those
> problems.
> 
This is the standard argument, but:


In practice, content-length is less safe than multipart boundaries,
and usually slower: you have no way of guaranteeing that the content
won't change even if you *think* it is static, and if the content
is dynamically generated, you have to buffer the entire content
before issuing the content-length. 


Of course, there are alternatives, e.g., a well known termination
string and a content encoding that guarantees the content doesn't
contain the termination string, or chunked encoding. 


Larry

-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter