Subject: [Simple] Review of draft-ietf-simple-message-sessions-08 - Chunking

From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:19:48 -0400

Out approach to chunking has evolved thru the versions, and the document
doesn't seem wholely clear and consistent about what we have arrived at.
In fact, I am not entirely certain I know fully what we have decided,
and I can't figure it out for certain from the document. I would propose
specific wording changes, but first I want to get clarification about
how we think it should now work.

Based on scattered information in the doc, and reading between the
lines, and factoring in stuff from conversations along the way, I
*think* the following is intended:

- only SEND messages are chunkable

- there are two kinds of chunks: interrruptible and uninterrupible.

- a chunk is uninterruptible if it has a Byte-Range header with a
    numeric range-end.

- other chunks are interruptible. (No Byte-Range, or a Byte-Range
    with a range-end of "*".)

- uninterruptible chunks MUST NOT have a range-end greater than 2048.

- chunks other than the last SHOULD (or MUST?) have a body ('data'
    in the syntax) of length exactly 2048. If SHOULD, what is a
    valid reason to violate?

- responses never have bodies at all. Requests other than SEND
    may have a body but are unchunkable. The presence of a Byte-Range
    in a request other than SEND says nothing about the body of that
    request. (In REPORT it refers to the SEND being reported on.
    See separate thread on Byte-Range.) This at best seems irregular
    and weird.

Section 6.3.1 says: "it is possible the body is shorter than the
range-end field indicates. This can occur if the sender interrupted a
SEND request unexpectedly." Based on what I have interpretted above,
this is no longer possible. (To be interrupted it must have had a
range-end of "*".)

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