Michael Rogers wrote: > Does anyone know how browsers react if they request an entire file and > get a 206 (partial content) response? Do they send additional requests > for the remaining data? If so, then perhaps partial content responses > could be used to deliver pieces of the file out-of-order? > > Perhaps it would be worth talking to the Mozilla people about > out-of-order downloads, since BitTorrent faces this problem too. From a > quick look at RFC 2616 I get the impression that servers are allowed to > send pieces of the file out of order, provided each piece is sent in a > separate response (you can't send a multipart/byteranges response to a > request for a single range). The question is how gracefully the client > will handle the situation...
You (and others) assume there is such a thing as a "part of the file". With FEC encoding there is no such thing. If you have enough blocks (2/3), you have the whole file; otherwise you have nothing. Matthew can correct me, if I'm mistaken. Doc -- Theory asserts that although in theory there should be no difference between theory and practice, in practice there IS difference between theory and practice.
