What about .directory - thread once was: Konqueror FTP TEXT MODE

[Juergen Pfennig]

On Monday 06 November 2006 14:33, David Faure wrote:
> On Mon Nov 6 2006, you wrote:
> > And what do you think about: ftp://joe@ftp.heaven.af.mil/report;type=a?
> > (stolen from http://cr.yp.to/ftp/browsing.html)
>
> That's a solution that makes sense with command-line tools like "kfmclient
> copy" and when supplying a URL to an application directly (e.g. "kate
> <url>").
>
> It doesn't solve the full problem of using konqueror to list a directory
> and drag-n-drop'ing stuff out of there, but at least if we assume some way
> of marking text files as such, then konqueror can provide the information
> that a file is text in the URL and anything done with that file will be
> done in text mode then (opening with any editor or copying in konqueror).
>
> I would have used a http query instead of a semicolon though; a "?" in a
> filename gets escaped whereas a ";" in a filename would be valid. And we
> have support in KUrl for query items. So I would have used
> ftp://joe@ftp.heaven.af.mil/report?type=a I wonder how "standard" in
> browsers is the ";type=a" notation though, this should be tested with other
> browsers first.

ASCII vs EDCDIC is only one aspect of the problem. Please think also about 
cp1250 (Windows) vs. UTF-8 encoded file names. Another point is the time 
zone. To handle such stuff we also could use a server side approach:

(1) Parse the banner that the ftp server will send at login time.
    Here we could look for strings like "FTP_TIME_ZONE=UTC+2" or
    "FTP_CHARSET=cp1250". At least FTP admins could place the info
    here.

(2) Look for a ".directory" file. Konqueror likes that anyhow. What about
    adding some X-blabla entries for FTP (and similar kio-slaves)? Again
    this needs some help from the server side.

Jürgen