--On Wednesday, October 4, 2017 06:05 -0700 Joe Touch
<touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 9/29/2017 7:48 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>> How strange, I have always found FTP to be an absolute dog of
>> a protocol precisely because it mandates idiot defaults and
>> implementations are required to perform heuristic hacks. I
>> always used to have to transmit files twice because the first
>> time the transfer would be corrupted by the default being
>> 'trash my data in case I am using an IBM machine'.
>>
>> The separation of the command and data is a good one but
>> separating it over separate TCP/IP streams is an utter
>> disaster for reliability. None of the FTPS clients I have
>> found for Windows is able to reliably transmit a Web site
>> update.
>
> HTTP ignored this at their own peril, and ended up creating
> its own multiplexing layer to avoid HOL blocking and support
> signalling and reinventing parts of FTP poorly, IMO.
>
> Faults in the implementation of Windows software are far too
> easy to find to blame them on the protocol itself.
And that is a specific, and IMO helpful, example of the point I
was trying to make. We would do well to look carefully at
protocols like FTP (and even, e.g., Archie, Gopher and WAIS) to
see what can be learned from them rather than saying "It, or
implementations of it, won't do XYZ well, therefore it is
hopelessly obsolete and should be abandoned or deprecated".
Similarly, rather than saying what amounts to "ABC (typically
'the web') has won and everything else is irrelevant" --a claim
I've even heard relative to lower-layer protocols not needed to
directly support HTTP/HTTPS-- we should be asking whether there
are problems, even niche problems, that can be better addressed
in other ways.
We might even end up with a richer and more diverse and useful
Internet.
john