Telnet and FTP to Historic

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

No, don't fix FTP. At this point it has been rendered obsolete by SFTP
which is a subsystem of SSH.

FTPS has lost out to SFTP in the market. There is no advantage to
continuing to support a rival and there is a considerable cost. The
interests of the community would be best served by focusing all development
on SSH/SFTP and declaring Telnet and FTP HISTORIC. Doing that might help
focus attention on the fact SFTP doesn't have an RFC and encourage moves to
complete that work.

[That said, I am a little peeved at the lack of a telnet system on some
platforms as I frequently used it to connect to a raw port and rest out
services.]


On the format conversion issue, the FTP spec has a MUST that actually
requires the default client behavior to be to assume an ascii conversion is
desired.

There being a negligible number of ESCIDC and 9 bit machines on the
Internet in the 1990s. this always irritated me to the point of patching
the client to remove the stupid.

The biggest mistake in the Web protocols was accepting the dictum of being
permissive in what is accepted. Horrors like MIME sniffing might had been
avoided if enough browsers had insisted on literal interpretation of
content type. What I find really appalling is that there are circumstances
in which some browsers have at various times been written with the default
behavior of ignoring correctly labelled content and then signalling an
error when it doesn't render under the incorrectly assumed type.