On 12/1/20 11:40 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Of course we could have stuck to vinyl. But FTP is more like grandad's 78s. There is absolutely nothing to recommend FTP over HTTP. Rsync is vastly superior for file transfer.
False, on multiple levels.
The biggest flaw of HTTP for file transfer (if one wants to
transfer more than one file) is that HTTP doesn't have a built-in
way to list files, distinguish files from directories from other
kinds of nodes, and walk a file system.
Rsync, certainly at the time that HTTP was designed (it may have
improved since then) had a LOT of overhead because it tried to
analyze each file for changes within the file, minimizing
bandwidth used (which to be fair, was quite scarce) at a cost of
CPU time and latency. Circa 1993 I looked at using rsync to
replicate a web site to multiple locations (early CDN I suppose)
and found it completely inadequate.
Of course FTP was designed for file transfer, including between
dissimilar systems (which were very common in ARPAnet days), and
HTTP wasn't designed for that purpose. There was nothing wrong
with designing a new protocol for the web especially since the web
had different needs, different assumptions, and operated under
different conditions.
But the web has NEVER been a good way to do file transfer. Wasn't in 1991, and isn't today. And the protocol designed for the web isn't either without adding some additional features.
Keith
