I want my FTP: bits on demand

A look under the hood of the IETF´s file transfer protocol, including a summary of the commands in the FTP standard. Today, FTP is used primarily for maintaining archives of public files, and is losing ground to HTTP even there. FTP simply doesn´t maintain as much metadata: not creation date, not original location, not application data type. Its addressing structure is an opaque pathname at a host. Consider that in the context of mirroring or relocating information: FTP mirrors are an ad hoc, user driven abstraction; HTTP can send automatable redirection messages. Per-site metadata is also provided manually as OOindex files, compared to automatable Web spiders