IPP Mail Archive: Re: IPP> MIME multipart/* vs HTTP
Re: IPP> MIME multipart/* vs HTTP
Robert Herriot (
Robert.Herriot@Eng.Sun.COM)
Wed, 30 Apr 1997 12:44:31 -0700
> From lawrence@agranat.com Wed Apr 30 12:05:41 1997
>
> IPP> We believe that chunked applies to the entire multipart/mixed
> IPP> entity and cannot be used for one of the sub-entities alone.
> IPP> Thus there is no length to mark the boundary of a sub-entity.
>
> Correct; the 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' applies to all of the HTTP
> message body. For completeness, my companys' server implementation
> does support chunked encoding of the entire multipart/* body part,
> but we think it doesn't make much sense (because it is redundant) so
> that support may be compiled out to save code.
>
Why is chunking redundant? It seems important for the case where the
client doesn't know the length of the data at the beginning of the
transmission. Without the Transfer-Encoding of chunked, HTTP/1.1 seems
to require a Content-Length for a client transmission (as a client, it
cannot close the connection and multipart/byterange doesn't seem
appropriate for clients to send).