Am 30.11.2020 um 19:35 schrieb Keith Moore:
On 11/30/20 12:25 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
But if what you actually need to do is browse files to pick out the ones
you want, vanilla HTTP doesn't provide what a tool needs to reliably do
that.
It does not?
No, it does not. Vanilla HTTP doesn't have a way of listing what files
are available or what their characteristics are. WebDAV PROPFIND can do
that, not vanilla HTTP. The content you get back may have links to some
files but you can't reliably distinguish from links that are files in a
collection like RFCs or I-Ds, and links that are pointers to other
things. Sure, you can make a tool that tries to screen scrape whatever
it gets back and make some sense of it, but there's no reason to believe
that such a tool will be reliable or continue to be reliable.
I read "if what actually need to do" as applying to a human user. And
yes, in that case you usally do get some sort of UI that let's you pick
the files you want. It's just not a standardized UI, as it depends on
what the web site developer supplies/configures.
What you apparently want is something that can be used programatically.
One candidate for that would indeed be WebDAV.
Best regards, juliaj
