"Wide load" status code(s)?

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great solderpunk once stated:
> Hey all,
> 
> Just throwing out a quick idea I had last night while trying to sleep,
> to see how people feel about it.  It's simple and easily ignorable and I
> think it's kind of neat.

  [ snip ]

> Naturally, deciding to do this will lead immediately to a weeks-long
> heated debate on what the appropriate value of $THRESHOLD should be.  We
> *could* wade into those waters, but I'll just also throw out that we
> could use 21, 22 and 23 to indicate payloads exceeding 1MiB, 10MiB or
> 100MiB respectively and leave it at that.  Clients targetting
> resource-limited environments could let their users configure their own
> threshold for early termination of downloads.

  I'm replying here because I think this is the best play to reply with my
thoughts.  I have read the rest of this thread and will be referencing some
later emails.  You have been warned.

  Dispite being the one who pushed for larger status codes, I'm not a fan of
this proposal, but I can't fully explain *why* other than to say "where does
it stop?"  Like Tadeusz Sosnierz alluded too, what's huge today may be small
tomorrow [1].  Personally, I think adding the filesize to the MIME type *is*
the best answer, but I can see and even agree with the arguemnts against it.
And I think I'm justified in saying that [2].

  Petite Abeille has listed the options that are open today, but solderpunk
didn't like the suggestion(s) as they might complicate the client.  But a
client that simply reads the entire response with a single call, while
simple, is a problem waiting to happen.  What if the response doesn't fit
into memory?  It may be reasonable to say that "text/*" can fit into memory,
but video/*?  image/*?  (seriously, I have a 306MB beautiful image of the
moon, probably from NASA).

  I'm not sure what the best solution is though.

  -spc

[1]	The first real editor I used was 40k in size.  Today, there are
	people who use editors that consume over 1G of RAM when running.

[2]	Visual pun, but you have to use a monosopace font to see it.