13 Mar
2007
13 Mar
'07
9:48 a.m.
der Mouse wrote:
Line ending conversion and character set conversion
are *exactly* the
sort of things that need doing upon file transfer between heterogenous
systems. One of FTP's major advantages is that it is prepared to
handle such things.
Hmm, personally I'm not convinced, purely because every single FTP
implementation can't hope to cover every possible conversion that every person
will ever want done :-)
In situations like that I think I'd rather it dictate that people *always*
have to do appropriate conversions locally, rather than a "sometimes you
might, sometimes you might not" policy.
More generally, it was designed for file transfer
rather than hypertext
transport (as reflected in the protocol names), and, oddly enough, it
works better for the purpose, including things like restarts and
preservation of file structure more complicated than "big array of
octets" or "big array of lines of text".
I'd certainly agree there. Whoever decided that HTTP should be hacked into a
more general-purpose transport protocol needs hitting around the head with an
exceedingly large fish. The 'net as a whole is a far worse place because of it
I think.