Also SQLite store data in pages and the page size can be tweaked. Combined with range requests any part of the database can be requested.

the most recent update to the W3C's own research webserver, written in Java, called Jigsaw, seems to be dated in 2007. I used it for a lot of purposes until 2002 but I don't know why I stopped working with Jigsaw only that by the time F# emerged in 2004 I was absorbed into a new direction :

https://jigsaw.w3.org/

iirc Jigsaw was used to develop and validate the WebDAV protocols and XQUERY which at the time I remember thinking XQUERY was sure to be the future as implementations of advanced data management and manipulation and query and distribution and declaration looked to be what the whole point of webservers were for. The incredible distractions caused by "rich media" as opposed to multimedia as it was understood then, are really worth thinking about. Saying that, however, the BBC is doing excellent work on restoring the balance of necessary powers to the network standards engineers https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/about-bbc-sounds...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2014-03-media-source-extension...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/nearly-live-production

BTW thank you havernator, because I have just realised what I can do with the setup I'm almost ready to pull the trigger on that'll give me a surfeit of online capacity (at least a baseload can be maintained while the rest is used for work instead of cloud time) : I am definitely going to investigate the possibility of providing a high level of standards specifications for simple web serving. If the W3C Jigsaw project had been maintained, I'd simply put it up and invite interested users to persuade me to send them a shell login. OK obviously that's far too naive today, but I would love to run a especially standards compliant host for negligible nominal or even no charge so people could maybe get a view of better ways to present the WWW.

frankly I think that unless we do things like this, the Internet is simply going to become a closed shop to anyone not wielding enterprise budgets and legal department capabilities.