RE: Stayin' Alive

Rick Troth (TROTH@UA1VM.UA.EDU)
Wed, 21 Dec 1994 02:46:26 +0100

>Hi Rick,
>
>The way this has been discussed on www-speed (and subsequently
>www-talk) is to add a HTTP header line "Pragma: Keep-connection" that
>basically works like:
>
>Client Sends: GET /foo.html HTTP/1.0
> ...
> Pragma: Keep-connection
> ...
>
>If the server supports the pragma and the item being requested has a
>known length, it includes the pragma in the reply:
>
>Server Sends: HTTP/1.0 200 OK
> ...
> Pragma: Keep-connection
> ...
> Content-length: 2048
> ...

But did we reach agreement? I wasn't sure.

>As you noted, in the cases where the content length is not known such
>as from server scripts, a packet approach would be nice. My personal
>take is it's not worth it to modify HTTP/1.0 to support packets like
>this as that support is already speced for HTTP-NG. Retrieving n files
>with known lengths is the most common case (i.e., a homepage with seven
>images) and is the most interesting one to optimize especially
>considering the trivial changes needed by the client and server.

Not trivial. I'm on a filesystem that might not tell me
(usually doesn't) the exact number of bytes. :-(

>John

--
Rick Troth <troth@ua1vm.ua.edu>, Houston, Texas, USA
http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~troth/