By sequentially transmitting whole directory trees? FTP-the-protocol never had anything useful to say here. It's always been about FTP-the-client and these didn't need things like "control channels" and "active mode" to do what they're doing.

FTP is a pretty conceited protocol, and one that deserves to go away. People say it made more sense in the 80's, but I was there and even then *NIX/Solaris admins found FTP to be about as much fun as that IRC pingback identd service; which is to say not very fun.

There's webdav, but it seems to me it never caught on for some reason, and it's mostly dead these days.

I tried implementing WebDAV servers some 10+ years ago. Back then this was a major pain with different clients expecting and sending different properties etc. No idea how this looks these days.

I think I last tried it four years ago or so. Not much had changed. I briefly used Apache as a server; I think the server was fine, but the open source clients were flaky at best. I also used to have a hosting account that included WebDAV support, among others, but I never got any client to work with it except for the web interface bolted on top of that thing.

I'm surprised to see WebDAV mentioned here, to be honest, I thought it was a dead horse everywhere except in enterprise.

It's still a little kludgy, but it got a lot better in November when Firefox joined Chrome and Edge in implementing "folder upload". https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/50#File...

In the use case of kernel.org a folder download feature would be needed, maybe even recursive.

We offer rsync for that purpose.

Good point, I didn't really think of that. I have used wget -r but that's not very HTML 5 lol

How about WebDAV? Is that minimally relevant these days? If not, what has superseded it?

The modern web is much more about routes, resources, and URLs than directories and files.

...and can you transfer data from one server to another without downloading it locally?

rsync will do it nicely.