Also sprach Andrew Brown
http is a good idea, but...
"mime typing"? i don't want a program that's gonna tell me what i have to do with my data, or with whihc program i will have to open it later.
Where on earth did you get the idea that mime typing requires all that? The mime type is just one side telling the other side what it thinks is in the file (and giving some other nice little benefits like encoding transformations and stuff). What you do with the file once you get it doesn't have anything to do with the mime type unless *you* configure your program to pay attention to the mime type and do something with it. If you want to tell your program to open a postscript file in RealMedia Player...so be it, you can do that...not to much effect I wouldn't think, but that's totally up to you to do it. If you want to set your program so every mime type just dumps out to a file, you can do that too.
my data belongs in a file, exactly as i requested it. with the appropriate line-termination, of course, which http doesn't do.
Again, conversion of line termination is controlled by the end system, not the protocol itself. FTP happens to have defined in the RFCs how it should be handled...there's no reason you can't do the same process with http-received files.
""human-beneficial markup"? you just said we need a "machine-parsable file indexing method". what do we need humans for?
Because, while I sometimes write programs/scripts that go out and parse directories and get the files I want, I *very* often manually go in and get individual files that I desire...any setup like this needs to support both.
caching usually gets in the way.
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