3.12 Range Units


HTTP/1.1 allows a client to request that only part (a range of) the response entity be included within the response. HTTP/1.1 uses range units in the Range (section 14.35) and Content-Range (section 14.16) header fields. An entity can be broken down into subranges according to various structural units.
      range-unit       = bytes-unit | other-range-unit
      bytes-unit       = "bytes"
      other-range-unit = token


The only range unit defined by HTTP/1.1 is "bytes". HTTP/1.1 implementations MAY ignore ranges specified using other units.

HTTP/1.1 has been designed to allow implementations of applications that do not depend on knowledge of ranges.