On 11/17/20 4:20 PM, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
By now I think I also qualify as old timer, and yet I find the claim that FTP is simple while HTTP is "complex" far from credible. If anything, the reverse is actually true. With binary vs. text modes, passive vs. active modes, separate control and data channels, FTP is far from "simple".
True, but these days you mostly just use PASV and TYPE I (unless perhaps the client detects some baroque OS). Clever clients try to handle any kind of FTP server that might exist, but a client doesn't need to support the whole protocol if it knows it's talking to a UNIX/Linux system. (I'm not particularly worried about IETF migrating its servers to MCP...)
For comparison, HTTP redirect handling can be somewhat hairy, and add TLS on top of that which is quite often necessary these days. Probably most simple clients can get away with using HTTP/1.1 today but who knows how long that will last.
And HTML is not relevant to the discussion. The content type is same (either plain text or HTML) regardless of the transfer method.
The relevance is only if you need to parse the HTML, say, to figure out the names of files on the server. Which you often do need to do. But that illustrates a problem with HTTP (sans WebDAV) - the content intended for humans isn't clearly distinct from the information needed by the client. (Say you're trying to download new RFCs - the client needs to know which <A>'s refer to RFCs and which refer to, say, navigation around the site. It's not rocket science but it is annoying, especially given that web sites change from time to time.)
Keith
