Whilst I was vaguely aware that some web servers could starting sending responses before the complete content of the response was prepared, I've never needed it or looked at the mechanism.

Today at work I noted some strange numbers on some pages displayed in Konqueor. It seems that the Etch version of Konqueror doesn't seem to support chunked encoding correctly. Nor does "wget". Both put the length data into the data part, that is the length in hexadecimal before the data part and a trailing 0 to terminate the last chunk. wget is still broke in sid (and generally I think, there is a vaguely labelled "support HTTP/1.1" bug report filed against it upstream -- they really need some C coders to help out). "curl" and "Firefox" do the "right thing".

So now I know what those weird numbers showing in Konqueror are on some websites, not that I use Konqueror much, and I shall know to be even more careful with my spidering if I use wget.