Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Am 30.11.2020 um 19:35 schrieb Keith Moore:
> On 11/30/20 12:25 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>
>>> But if what you actually need to do is browse files to pick out the ones
>>> you want, vanilla HTTP doesn't provide what a tool needs to reliably do
>>> that.
>>
>> It does not?
>
> No, it does not.   Vanilla HTTP doesn't have a way of listing what files
> are available or what their characteristics are. WebDAV PROPFIND can do
> that, not vanilla HTTP.  The content you get back may have links to some
> files but you can't reliably distinguish from links that are files in a
> collection like RFCs or I-Ds, and links that are pointers to other
> things.  Sure, you can make a tool that tries to screen scrape whatever
> it gets back and make some sense of it, but there's no reason to believe
> that such a tool will be reliable or continue to be reliable.

I read "if what actually need to do" as applying to a human user. And
yes, in that case you usally do get some sort of UI that let's you pick
the files you want. It's just not a standardized UI, as it depends on
what the web site developer supplies/configures.

What you apparently want is something that can be used programatically.
One candidate for that would indeed be WebDAV.

Best regards, juliaj