Re: Regarding "Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service"

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/25/20 3:25 PM, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:

> I am curious why you need these features.

You mean, you really don't understand why these features are useful and 
can save significant time for many IETF participants?

- An ftp server can be treated as a remote file system by many 
platforms.  That means, for example, if you're editing an I-D and you 
want to refer to some other document, you can open that document in your 
favorite text editor without the editor needing specific support for 
FTP.  If your editor has windows (such editors have existed since at 
least the late 1970s), you can see the I-D you are editing and the 
document you're referring to side-by-side with no wasted screen space.   
This is a LOT more effective than trying to deal with your editor in one 
window and a web browser in another, partly because web browsers and web 
pages both tend to make very poor utilization of screen space, but also 
because multiple windows within your editor have the same UI, whereas 
the web browser and your editor probably have different UIs.   The same 
feature makes it possible to _easily_ print some set of documents ("lpr 
draft-*workinggroupname*.pdf), or copy some set of documents, or search 
through ("grep") some set of documents ("which internet-draft contains 
the text...") or ("which internet-drafts reference RFCXXXX?")

[I personally find printing is the best way to review documents because 
then I can easily annotate them with ancient writing utensils, which is 
far better than trying to do so using any keyboard-based tool I've ever 
seen.   And I refuse to feel bad about that :) ]

- Some FTP clients have filename completion.   So if you're looking for 
a particular file, you don't have to search through all of the text on a 
web page.   Sure the web browser has a Search feature, but it doesn't 
distinguish file names from other text, and there's no assurance that 
the files you're looking for are all grouped together.   Filename 
completion can be implemented fairly efficiently in FTP, because if you 
type "a" the client can do "LIST a*", then when you type "b" after "a" 
the client can do "LIST ab*", etc.

- Most FTP clients support multiple file transfer via wildcards (e.g. 
draft-*-workinggroupname-*) .   Many support an effective "batch" 
transfer UI: Select the files you want and press "start" or some such, 
and all of the files you selected are quickly transferred for you.   
This has been an effective interface for file transfer ever since at 
least the Xerox Alto, and has been duplicated by many clients since then 
because it works well.  Web browsers generally require you to start each 
transfer separately, maybe specify a destination for each separately, 
and often, to manage them separately (they may queue up multiple 
transfers or do multiple concurrent transfers but you still have to go 
back and check to see that they were successfully downloaded because 
failures are common for some reason.  The browser is really optimized 
around letting you read things rather than letting you transfer files, 
especially multiple files, robustly.).

- Similarly, many editors have built-in or plug-in support for FTP.   A 
lot of Windows users like Notepad++ which has a plugin for this.  GNU 
Emacs for Unix/Linux has an "ftp" command (M-x ftp) that basically lets 
you talk to the local ftp client on your machine, but it also ships with 
"remote file" support so you can directly open (for example) 
/ftp:[e-mail]:ftp/internet-drafts/draft-moore-exclusionary-language-00.txt 
.   Filename completion is supported here so at any point  you can type 
? to list potential completions or TAB to complete the filename as far 
as it can be given the alternatives available. MUCH faster than 
searching in a web browser.

- Using FTP, I can search for an internet-draft or RFC from my phone; I 
can browse the documents by name or date order or size; I can edit the 
document on my phone or import text into notes or email; I can send the 
document to a printer from my phone.    Yes, the phone has a built-in 
web browser but many web sites are far from ideal for a handheld 
device.   By contrast the FTP client is written specifically to be used 
on such a device, so it doesn't waste screen space AND it's more 
functional for some purposes than the web browser.

- And there's a lot of value in NOT expecting participants to learn a 
new interface when an old one works well.   "The Web" is not better than 
FTP for all purposes; it's a different tool with different strengths and 
limitations.   Expecting people to use new, crippled interfaces is not 
only a kind of age discrimination, it also deprives newer people of the 
ability to use those interfaces which could improve their productivity also.

A huge benefit of FTP is that the client can be small and relatively 
simple.   That makes it feasible to embed FTP clients in very many 
applications, which provide improved user interfaces as compared to 
having to use a separate client to do file access than the one used to 
manipulate the files.   That's not to say that you can't embed a web 
browser in an application - often you can - but then you don't easily 
get the benefit of an application that's well-tailored for your 
particular purpose and you also get a lot of baggage that you might 
rather do without.

Keith