Why don't you develop the segment idea into a MIME Content-encoding
type, e.g. Content-encoding: x-stream
Rather than a binary value for the segment length, I think we need
an ascii representation to avoid big-endian/little-endian problems.
I propose the number is represented as a string of one or more
digits from '0' to '9' terminated with a '\0' character. This is
followed by the corresponding number of octets (bytes).
This could then be combined with the keep connection pragma. One issue
to be resolved would be how x-stream would interact with say x-compress
or x-gzip. Perhaps we could allow multiple Content-encoding headers where
the receiving process applies the corresponding decode operation in the
order the Content-encoding headers appear in the MIME header.
-- Best wishes,Dave Raggett
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hewlett Packard Laboratories email: dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com Filton Road tel: +44 272 228046 Stoke Gifford fax: +44 272 228003 Bristol BS12 6QZ United Kingdom