Re: Holding connections open: an immodest proposal

HALLAM-BAKER Phillip (hallam@dxal18.cern.ch)
Thu, 15 Sep 1994 13:21:22 +0200


In article <8688@cernvm.cern.ch> you write:

|>Marc VanHeyningen writes:
|>
|>> The only real alternative anyone has suggested to Content-Length: is
|>> the MIME multipart boundary approach. It's not clear to me that
|>> that's better, and it sure as heck isn't backward-compatible.
|>
|>Content-Length is fine where the server is reading from file it can stat,
|>but becomes problematic where the response is generated by say a program.
|>
|>Another approach is to use a byte code escape mechanism, e.g.
|>
|> a) replace all occurrences of \ by \\ and '\0' by \0
|> b) use '\0' not preceded by a \ to denote stream delimiter
|>

There is already such a scheme in SMTP the sequence \cr\lf\.\cr\lf terminates
a stream and is escaped by \cr\lf..\cr\lf.

But it is real uggli bunnies.

--
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker

Not Speaking for anyone else.