Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/30/20 8:25 AM, Carsten Bormann wrote:

> Recent RFCs (from RFC 8650 on) have not been ASCII, even in the plain-text version.
> Even if the author’s text was ASCII-only Unicode, upon publishing a UTF-8 BOM is added.
> (I think that is wrong, but that is a separate discussion, and I’m obviously in the rough here.)
>
> Also, recent RFCs in plain-text version have not been paginated, which maybe what you call a “stream”.
> (I also think that is suboptimal, but that is yet another discussion again.)
>
> None if this is dependent on the mode of access.
>
> Note that Web browsers might be adding BOMs or might be changing their behavior based on the presence of a BOM, which may be part of the unexplained effects you might be seeing.  Preferably, don’t use Web browsers or other sources of intelligent behavior.

I learned a long time ago that if I want to print an (older) RFC or I-D 
from a web browser, the browser will delete the form feeds between pages 
even if it preserves the remainder of the text.  So if I want to print 
an RFC, I download the RFC in PDF format and print that.

If I just want to read the text, I might view the HTML.   But until 
recently the HTML versions have been so bad that I preferred to read the 
text versions.  The more recent versions of HTML from the RFC Editor are 
better.

If I want to edit an RFC I'll probably go looking for the xml 
versions.   If I actually want plain text I'll "download" (not view) the 
.txt version and edit it in emacs, which last I knew didn't get confused 
by BOMs and explicitly showed the characters in front of the file where 
they're easily deleted.  (But this might have changed, I haven't been 
bitten by BOMs in RFCs yet)

If I want a copy of the ASCII text of a single RFC I'll often right 
click and select download from a web browser.

If I want multiple RFCs of any type I'll fire up an FTP client.

But yeah, web browsers get in the way of a lot of reasonable things.  
IMO, if you view a file and then select "Save" it should save the 
original version of the file and not the HTML version that it converted 
the file into for convenience of displaying it.   But I gave up on 
browsers being reasonable a long time ago.

(Note that all the browsers I know/knew that still support(ed) ftp 
are/were agnostic about how the file was obtained - they would apply the 
same damage to a .txt file downloaded via ftp as to the same file 
downloaded via http.)


Keith