Re: FTP "type" declaration

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 14:07 +0000, Wood, John (HP Labs) wrote:
> Hi there,

Hi... sorry for the delay in responding...

> Apologies if you are not the person to mention this to.
> 
> I just spotted a discrepancy in the FTP URI defintion on the addressing
> page on the W3C website.
>
> Background: In the FTP URI, you can include a statement at the end of
> the URI of the form ";type=<typecode>" to indicate what transfer more to
> use (e.g. ascii or "image" [binary]).
> 
> On the W3C website [1] it states that the type should take the form:
>    
> 
>     ;type = <type-code>
>     ...
>     The type code is in the format defined in RFC959...
> 
> 
> In RFC959 [2], the <type-code> is defined as:
> 
>     <type-code> ::= A [<sp> <form-code>]
>                           | E [<sp> <form-code>]
>                           | I
>                           | L <sp> <byte-size>
> 
> 
> Note these are all capital letters (A, E, I, L) so, for example to
> indicate using the "image" mode you would put:
> 
>      ;type=I
> 
> However, in RFC1738[3], it states 
> 
>      ...<typecode> is one of the characters "a", "i", or "d"...
> 
> Here they are indicated as lower case.
> 
> So anyway, there is a discrepancy here. Obviously I guess the simple
> answer is to go with RFC1738 as it is more recent.

Right; that's the official definition...

That's one defintion of the FTP URI scheme; it happens to be
a really old one. Hmm... actually, it seems to be just
a few months older than the official one...

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt
 <- http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes.html
  <- http://www.w3.org/Addressing/



> Just wondered if you had any input on this?

For archival materials, I'm often conflicted as to whether to
let the HTTP last modified date speak for itself, or to put
an explicit "this is for archival use only" label on it somewhere.

> Regards,
> 
> John Wood
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_1_FTP.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc959/5_Declarative.html#z9
> [3] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html
> 
>    
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2006 15:02:29 UTC