Re: Protocol design: the Gemini project

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

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