Re: LYNX-DEV file downloading

[Matt Ackeret]

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, David Woolley wrote:
>Lynx is structured as a web browser, not a file downloader.  As such the
>bit that writes the file is several software layers away from the bit that
>talks the network protocol.  Doing ftp restarts would mean violating that
>layering, as well as moving the download destination dialogue to the start
>of the download, so that it knew the name of the file it was trying to
>restart.
>
>Trying to be Swiss army knives is one of the things that causes bloat
>in commercial browsers; the Unix philosophy has always been to have a 
>choice of tools, so you can choose a file downloader for downloading and
>a web browser for browsing.

But the Unix philosophy is actually to use an *external* program when possible
so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

So using ncftp (or normal ftp, or whatever the user sets up as their FTP client
as long as it has some established way of accepting a file path via command
line or environment variable) is actually following the Unix philosophy 
more than Lynx having its own ftp implementation.