On Monday 26 September 2011, Plüm, Rüdiger, VF-Group wrote: > > Agreed, if people decide our handling of range "0-" is not > > desirable, this would seem to be a showstopper on all three > > branches. Personally, I find the current behavior acceptable by > > the spec and per the underlying errata Roy has suggested. > > > > Clients should not be able to shift trivial processing (which > > the client is perfectly capable of performing) to the server in > > ways that increase network traffic or server load. HTTP/1.1 > > conversations must be designed to efficiently utilize network > > bandwidth, and these particular clients did not do that. I'm on > > the fence whether we should restore such abuse. > > I agree with you, but I am leaning towards to revert this > behaviour, because there are too much "stupid" clients out there. > So it looks like the "smarter" party has to give in :-). Sigh.
+1 Also, as documented in the Mozilla Bugzilla, there have also been dumb servers which send "Accept-Ranges: bytes" but don't support ranges. So it's somewhat understandable that clients try different methods to determine range support. They should have used a partial range request instead of requesting the whole file, though :-(
