On 11/20/20 11:38 AM, Chris Inacio wrote:
FTP was great in its day. I also really liked gopher. Maybe more than the current web. But let’s be real - that’s just not practical at this point, IMHO. The Internet (at large) has moved on, possible even enabled by IETF, we should keep to that reality.
I don't want to single you out specifically, Chris, but I really think this is a mischaracterization that lots of people are buying into.
It's not the case that some people choose FTP over HTTP and
others choose HTTP over FTP. Rather, some people find tools that
use FTP more useful than web browsers, for some purposes.
Even the people who use FTP sometimes probably use web browsers
for most RFC access. But for some purposes, FTP is a better
choice, because it supports functionality that web browsers don't
support and can't be supported with vanilla HTTP.
So "the Internet" has not moved on, but rather, some people use better tools than others.
The argument to deprecate FTP is essentially an argument that
people who prefer to use better tools shouldn't be able to do
so. It's an argument to cripple those tools and impair
those people's ability to work.
Of course there is some cost to maintaining an FTP server, but it
should not be a huge cost. There's certainly not been any support
for an argument that "that's just not practical". Has there even
been an estimate of the monetary cost of maintaining FTP?
And "let's be real" sounds like an argument for a certain kind of
prejudice - it could be rephrased as "let's force everybody to
conform to some completely arbitrary fashion".
I don't expect IETF to support forever every possible tool that everyone might want to use. But there's been no sound argument given so far that it should cripple FTP-based tools.
Keith
