It's elsewhere in the comments or the article: a feature of the protocol allows transmitting partial messages, where the message size is unknown. One example might be the result of a slow, unbuffered SQL query, where it's more useful for the server to pass the result to the client incrementally, rather than buffer the full message ahead of time.
Why you'd want to do that is another question entirely. Introducing roundtrips by feeding tiny chunks to TCP is generally a horrible idea, however, it does prevent the server from dedicating a potentially huge chunk of RAM to buffer the result ahead of time.
Because of this feature, and the author's desire to model this feature as part of some client library API (a mistake? you decide), he's concluded that it's in fact a stream-oriented protocol. That's like concluding it's a byte-oriented protocol because TCP can/will further fragment the partial frames due to segment size constraints, etc. (i.e. it's a silly conclusion).
I'm not sure I follow you to get to it being a "silly conclusion".
As I said, the draft at the time suggests presenting whole messages to the application layer. The parser can't know it has a whole message until it gets the final frame... This could lead to interesting memory usage ;)
The protocol provides for a series of infinitely long messages, each separated by a terminator. I don't have a problem with that in itself, but the draft at the time was misleading to suggest otherwise...
Why you'd want to do that is another question entirely. Introducing roundtrips by feeding tiny chunks to TCP is generally a horrible idea, however, it does prevent the server from dedicating a potentially huge chunk of RAM to buffer the result ahead of time.
Because of this feature, and the author's desire to model this feature as part of some client library API (a mistake? you decide), he's concluded that it's in fact a stream-oriented protocol. That's like concluding it's a byte-oriented protocol because TCP can/will further fragment the partial frames due to segment size constraints, etc. (i.e. it's a silly conclusion).