🚀 go-pugleaf

At present nearly all public domain files in the netland are available
with the FTP protocol. This is a widely used but not very comfortable
solution.

What do you believe OSI has to offer as an alternative?

Well, most people I asked about this told me: FTAM. Yes, FTAM has a number of
advantages, e.g. together with the latest Amendment 1, it has a well defined
machine readable directory format, which would allow nice GUI applications,
but this is not enough for archives.

The optimal protocol should not just offer access to a UNIX type filesystem
as FTP or FTAM do. There you only get a list of quite cryptic filenames and
you always have to read README files before you know which file you want to
download.

It would be fine to have a protocol which provides things like

   - free names for files/documents (e.g. with spaces, ISO 10646 characters).
   - for comfortable browsing attributes like a one-line-description of
     the file contents
   - an attribute that contains a longer description like the README file
     in many of today's *.tar.Z files. I want to be able to read this
     attribute before I load the whole package.
   - attributes like author, version number, keywords, ... in order
     to make browsing through the archive more comfortable.
   - search operations for keywords, author, names ... (a de luxe archie).
   - distributed search operations
   - a well defined unique identifier for each document
   - all attribute contents should be as much machine readable
     as possible in order to allow developping comfortable
     browsing tools.

Both FTP and FTAM have far less capabilities and are not the optimal
choice for a public file archive system.

Can anyone tell me whether the ISO DFR (document filing and retrieval)
protocol and service (ISO 10166) describes a better alternative?

Markus

---
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. ----------------
---------- They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.