ftp archives disappearing?

[Jules Richardson]

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.