On 30/11/2020 15:18, ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi!
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of
ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 9:37 AM
To: Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service
On 11/30/20 9:23 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
Over here, Firefox saves the originally received text file, so does
Chrome.
Perhaps that behavior has changed. When you learn a way to work
around damage, you tend to keep doing that even after the damage gets
fixed.
True. but more to the point, are you willing to bet that this behavior is never
ever going to change in any future version?
If so, I have a couple of bridges you may be interested in purchasing at Cyber
Monday discount prices.
I'm having trouble understanding the failure mode. Is the issue at hand that
when one uses a browser to download say
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230.txt, a text file isn't being returned?
Furthermore, is the concern that browser vendors have changed their behavior
over time when saving .txt files?
The failure mode is that browser behavior is in a constant state of flux. Some
time ago you got HTML-ized text, yesterday you got text without the form feeds,
today you get the text file verbatim. Who knows what you'll get tomorrow?
All the CSS preceding the text; well, that is what I got this morning
when prompted by Julian's post but tomorrow, well, tomorrow is another day!
As I just posted to Carsten, this was a major problem 35 years ago which
is why protocols like FTP are rich in options to handle this. I could
be 180 degrees wrong that HTTP/HTML is making no changes and so giving
just what is on the web site which is then no use to me and it is FTP
that knows what I really want and is making corrections for me, such as
inserting <CRLF> or <FF> where I need it
Tom Petch
And as Keith points out, the problem is significantly exacerbated by
experienced people not engaging in problematic behavior without really thinking
about it, leading them to assert that there are no land mines simply because
the path they have learned to follow avoids them.
Ned
.
