12th April 2000
Coming from the "It's Not The Same" department, Lockergnomaster Jim Kraai reveals a lesser-known Internet truth. We were sitting around the grill the other night talking about neat Web services; I brought up EMAILFILE.COM. "The only downfall," I said, "is that the MIME encoding bloats the attachment's size." Jim said that you're getting 'MIME bloat' when you transfer files via the Web. FTPing stuff is a completely different scenario. Long story short: the file size may be the same, but you're transferring less data if you download via FTP as opposed to HTTP. This does not imply that you'll receive things more quickly when you're FTPing, but it's food for thought.