document updated 15 years ago, on Sep 8, 2009
One strong concept in WWB is that of container files. Most bootloadable files are available on the web as container files. However, sometimes you just want a few files from the middle of a very large container file. But we're a bootloader, we want to boot quickly, we don't want to wait forever to download a huge file. Is there a quicker way to get small files from inside a large container?
Yes.
The general approach is to use the HTTP Range feature to only download parts of the (for example) .zip file. First you download enough of the head of the file that you get the TOC, and then you use the TOC to find out where the specific file you're looking for starts, and you request that range of bytes.