I love when typos go unnoticed. Well, in this case, it actually did get noticed and listed in an errata page, but by then it was too late…

Anyway, from section 4 of RFC 2616, the official documentation for version 1.1 of the HTTP protocol:

If the message uses the media type “multipart/byteranges”, and the ransfer-length is not otherwise specified, then this self- elimiting media type defines the transfer-length. This media type UST NOT be used unless the sender knows that the recipient can arse it; the presence in a request of a Range header with ultiple byte- range specifiers from a 1.1 client implies that the lient can parse multipart/byteranges responses.

Seems like a few characters got dropped in transmission somehow! I particularly like the part about whether “the recipient can arse it.”

Ah, the interesting things one finds while working on projects for networking class…