Re: Status of RFC 1738 -- 'ftp' URI scheme

Cheney, Austin scripsit:

> I have been watching this discussion about retiring RFC 1738.  It seems
> there are some hurdles preventing that action, such as the absence of an
> RFC for the "file" scheme and whether or not other dependent
> technologies are still in use.  In my view all these blocking conditions
> are most easily dismissed if the RFC is not retired, but is instead
> obsolete by a replacing document in the standards track.

RFC 1738 is about 99% obsolete already.  It describes general URL syntax
(now RFC 3986) and a variety of file schemes which were in use ehn 1738
came out: http, ftp, file, prospero, gopher, etc.  All of these now have
their own RFCs except file and afs.  Afs is actually obsolete (and may
never have been used), so file is all that remains.

The problem with file, in a nutshell, is that it has been very variously
implemented, and there's no agreement on what should be mentioned, if
anything, beyond the core file:///(path) and file://localhost/(path)
cases.

-- 
John Cowan   cowan@ccil.org   http://ccil.org/~cowan
I must confess that I have very little notion of what [s. 4 of the British
Trade Marks Act, 1938] is intended to convey, and particularly the sentence
of 253 words, as I make them, which constitutes sub-section 1.  I doubt if
the entire statute book could be successfully searched for a sentence of
equal length which is of more fuliginous obscurity. --MacKinnon LJ, 1940

Received on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 23:36:54 UTC