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CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

(fossil-scm.org)
422 points km | 3 comments | 13 Oct 24 19:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.581s | source
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michaelmior ◴[13 Oct 24 20:03 UTC] No.41831072[source]▶
> various protocols (HTTP, SMTP, CSV) still "require" CRLF at the end of each line

What would be the benefit to updating legacy protocols to just use NL? You save a handful of bits at the expense of a lot of potential bugs. HTTP/1(.1) is mostly replaced by HTTP/2 and later by now anyway.

Sure, it makes sense not to require CRLF with any new protocols, but it doesn't seem worth updating legacy things.

> Even if an established protocol (HTTP, SMTP, CSV, FTP) technically requires CRLF as a line ending, do not comply.

I'm hoping this is satire. Why intentionally introduce potential bugs for the sake of making a point?

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Ekaros ◴[13 Oct 24 20:23 UTC] No.41831256[source]▶
Thinking about it. Using CR alone in protocols actually make infinitely more sense. As that would allow use of LF in records. Which would make many use cases much simpler.

Just think about text protocols like HTTP, how much easier something like cookies would be to parse if you had CR as terminating character. And then each record separated by LF.

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1. mattmerr ◴[13 Oct 24 20:37 UTC] No.41831369[source]▶
ASCII already has designated bytes for unit, group, and record separators. That aside, a big drawback of using unprintable bytes like these is they're more difficult for humans to read in dumps or type on a keyboard than a newline (provided newline has a strict definition CRLF, LF, etc)
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2. fijiaarone ◴[14 Oct 24 02:32 UTC] No.41833693[source]▶
There is no reason those ascii characters need to stay unprintable. You could use other characters like an interpunct, silcrow, or down carat.
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3. eqvinox ◴[14 Oct 24 08:31 UTC] No.41835469[source]▶
There is in fact a reason those ASCII 'characters' should stay unprintable: the 0x00-0x1f (except Tab, CR, LF) range is explicitly excluded as invalid in a whole bunch of standards, e.g. XML.