# Re: URLs and types: concentrate on FTP

Richard W Wiggins (WIGGINS@msu.edu)
Fri, 04 Jun 93 00:10:23 EDT

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    Message-Id: <9306040502.AA20252@mocha.bunyip.com>

    Date:         Fri, 04 Jun 93 00:10:23 EDT

    From: Richard W Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>

    Subject:      Re: URLs and types: concentrate on FTP

    To: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>, uri@bunyip.com

    In-Reply-To:  Your message of Thu, 03 Jun 1993 18:28:11 -0400

>> FTP URLs should have a way to specify type.
>
>I don't buy it, because it's tantamount to saying that URLs are file names.
>Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not.

Huh? A URL is just like a Gopher selector string -- it's a server
name plus whatever you need to feed the server to grab the thing.
The string may resemble a file name, but it need not. Adding type
information doesn't make it any more like a file name. Instead,
it lets an administrator post multiple forms of a document, and
lets users (or their clients) make intelligent decisions as to
what to retrieve, based on what the user can deal with.
...
>.... This won't work because you are insisting, in effect, that
>everyone adopt a particular file naming convention for their ftp servers.
>
>In effect, we have 'optional' type information right now -- if the server
>uses this file naming convention, the type information is there. If the
>URL doesn't have a recognizable suffix, you can't tell the type of the
>object.

Putting typing in the URL liberates us from relying on extensions.
Conventions put the control in the wrong place. Today I got a
message from someone who was trying to set up a pointer to a
WK1 file via a Gopher FTP gateway. Current Gopher code doesn't
list that as a known binary extension, so this transfer always goes
ASCII. Seems to me that the type should go in the URL; if we
don't agree on that, it shouldn't be an array of file extensions
in the server.

/rich

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