# [John.Ockerbloom@gs1.sp.cs.cmu.edu: Re: FTP handling suggestion]

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Fri, 2 Sep 1994 16:21:26 PDT

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    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: [John.Ockerbloom@gs1.sp.cs.cmu.edu: Re: FTP handling suggestion]

    From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

    Message-Id: <94Sep2.162127pdt.2760@golden.parc.xerox.com>

    Date: 	Fri, 2 Sep 1994 16:21:26 PDT

I missed that this hadn't gone out to the whole list.

My take on this situation is that 'Mosaic for X version 2.4' doesn't
conform to the URL specification we've written, and that libwww
probably will have to be modified to conform. I'm less happy with a
description of 'ftp' URLs that says:

try the following thing, and if it doesn't work, try something else

but I'm willing to listen of others think I'm wrong.
================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 07:13:11 -0700
From: John.Ockerbloom@gs1.sp.cs.cmu.edu
To: masinter@parc.xerox.com
Subject: Re: FTP handling suggestion
Cc: spok@cs.cmu.edu

> Could you be more explicit about what you tried and what didn't work?

Sure. In Mosaic for X version 2.4 this works:

ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy

But none of these work:

ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub%2Fusenet-by-hierarchy
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/%2Fpub%2Fusenet-by-hierarchy
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/%2Fpub%2Fusenet-by-hierarchy%2F

It appears that this browser (a very common browser, and the main
one used here) doesn't unescape the characters.

On the other hand, our FTP system is set up so that users must
cd directly to the directory they're interested in. In other
words, if the target directory is /afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/spok/www,
a CWD directly there will work, but a piecewise CWD starting
with "afs", and so on, will fail.

We also require the leading-slash, as do many other sites.

So we're stuck with the situation that no FTP URL here (or at other
sites that require a leading slash) will work with
both the current browsers and the new browsers to come out of this
RFC, unless the new browsers use the "fallback" method I suggested.

Hope this helps explain things a little further.

John Ockerbloom

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