# FTP handling suggestion

John Ockerbloom (spok+@CS.CMU.EDU)
Mon, 29 Aug 1994 14:47:23 -0400

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    From: John Ockerbloom <spok+@CS.CMU.EDU>

    Subject: FTP handling suggestion

    Message-Id: <CvB870.A2I.1@cs.cmu.edu>

    Date: Mon, 29 Aug 1994 14:47:23 -0400

    To: uri@bunyip.com

The draft URL document notes:
> Within a name or CWD component, the characters "/" and ";" are
> reserved and must be encoded. The components are decoded prior to
> their use in the FTP protocol. In particular, if the appropriate
> FTP sequence to access a particular file requires supplying a
> string containing a "/" as an argument to a CWD or RETR command, it
> is necessary to encode each "/" as %2F.

While I recognize the usefulness of the FTP URL changes, particularly
for non-Unix filesystems, I'll also note that for sites like us,
where we effectively require slashes in CWD commands, this change
appears to be neither forward- nor backward-compatible.

(I just tried using the %2F convention from Mosaic for X 2.4; didn't
seem to work.)

I therefore suggest that implementors of clients for this protocol
fall back on the old ftp: retrieval semantics if a failure is detected
while attempting to change directories using the new semantics.

Given that the understanding of the new semantics will take a while to
percolate through the Net and the various browsers, you may want to
suggest this fallback in the RFC as a nice feature for a tolerant
browser to implement.

John Ockerbloom

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