Re: Slow HTTP Responses

jonm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Jon E. Mittelhauser)
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 94 17:09:21 CST
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To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu
From: jonm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Jon E. Mittelhauser)
Subject: Re: Slow HTTP Responses
Cc: sanders@bsdi.com, www-talk@www0.cern.ch, timbl@www0.cern.ch
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At 01:30 PM 1/14/94 PST, Larry Masinter wrote:
>I uneasy having to supply a separate information channel when you
>already have a channel established. The only problem is that you want
>to interpolate asynchronous information in the middle of a channel of
>other information. Telnet already does this by having some escape
>codes.
>

Uggggggggh!  Ugggggggggh!  Yuck! 
Please tell me you meant to include a smiley face here?!?

How do you plan on dealing with arbitrary binary data with status
information intermixed?  Take a simple GIF file.  How would you
recognize the escape codes intermixed with the binary data?  I 
presume you are envisioning some crazy magic number scheme but this
simply is impractical...

The telnet example just is not at all relavant as to how the
Web should work.  It doesn't work that well in the first place and
is not at all extensible...

>Why not use an escape code mechanism for those information channels
>that want to send status information back? This won't be MOST servers,
>only a few. The client just would have to look for the escape codes in
>the data stream.
>

In _any arbitrary_ data stream.  Why bother?

Other than the implementation work involved, what are 
the problems that people see with the UDP scheme that Tony and I 
were suggesting?

-Jon

---
Jon E. Mittelhauser (jonm@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Research Programmer, NCSA                          (NCSA Mosaic for MS Windows)
More info <a href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/People/jonm/jonm.html">here</a>