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Demiurge | 3 months ago

Also, the protocol is pretty much a holdover from the earliest days, before encryption, or complicated NATs. I remember using it with just telnet a few times. It's pretty cool, but absolutely nobody should be using FTP these days. I remember saying this back in the 2005, and here we are 20 years later, someone still lamenting dropping FTP support from a browser? I think we're decades overdue.

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tracker1|3 months ago

I'm not lamenting it being removed.. but will say that it was probably a huge multiple more popular and widely used than XSLT is in the browser.

Demiurge|3 months ago

I'm genuinely curious about that. But, this says a lot more about how different these standards are. FTP really needed a good successor, which it never really got. So, there is a strong use case, but technical deficiency to the protocol. So, FTP was overcome by a meriad of web forms and web drive sites, as a way to fill the gap. Still, resumable chunked uploads are really hard to implement from scratch, even now.

Dropping XSLT is about something different. It's not bad an in an obvious way. It's things like code complexity vs applicability. It's definitely not as clear of an argument to me, and I haven't touched XSLT in the past 20 years of web development, so I am not sure about the trade-offs.

grumbel|3 months ago

The problem wasn't that FTP got deprecated, but that we never got a proper successor. With FTP you could browse a directory tree like it was a real file system. With HTTP you can't, it has no concept of a directory. rsync is the closest thing to a real successor, but no Web browser support that either.

catdog|3 months ago

There would be WebDAV which adds such features to HTTP but that's also not supported by web browsers.

Demiurge|3 months ago

I agree that we should get a successor, but if it got deprecated way back, I think we would have more likely gotten one. For just downloads, I have used apache and nginx directory and file listing functionality with ease.

koakuma-chan|3 months ago

I worked for a company where I had to make screenshots every minute and upload them via FTP for review to get paid. If there was multiple screenshots with the same thing on the screen, there would be questions.

ErroneousBosh|3 months ago

Did you do any work besides taking screenshots and trying to figure out why FTP was broken this time?

Your old job's broken workflow is not a good reason for keeping a fundamentally broken protocol that relies on allowing Remote Code Execution as a privileged user around.