My thoughts about range requests
Additionally to pagination also range request should be used to reduce traffic.
I understand that there are corner cases making this a complicated matter.
I would like to see a meta header saying that the given twtxt is append only with increasing timestamps so that a simple strategy can detect valid content fetched per range request.
- read meta part per range request
- read last fetched twt at expected range (as known from last fetch)
- if fetched content starts with expected twt then process rest of data
- if fetched content doesn’t start with expected twt discard all and fall back to fetching whole twtxt
Pagination (e.g. archiving old content in a different file) will lead to point 4.
Of course especially pods should support range requests, correct @prologic@twtxt.net?