The FTP protocol is one of the several protocols supported as part of the World Wide Web. HTML documents anywhere on the Web may link to your FTP server and reference binary, ASCII, HTML, or program files on your server. Once downloaded to a client workstation, these files may be processed in a number of ways, depending on how the FTP client is configured to post-process a document.

Providing a link from a Web page to an FTP file for download is simple, and is done with the Anchor tag (the "A" tag). Simply use the URL to the FTP file as the hypertext reference ("HREF") in the anchor tag, and the file will be downloaded when the link is clicked on by a user.

For example, to reference a file called bigfile.sit you would use an HTML command like this:

<A HREF="ftp://ftp.rumpus.com/bigfile.sit">Download this really big file</A>

Figure 26: A hyperlink to a binary file on an FTP server.

It is also possible to create a link to a password protected file by specifying the username and password in the URL. The username and password immediately follow the "ftp://" portion of the URL and are separated by a colon. After the password, use an at-sign ("@") and then the rest of the URL as usual. For example, the FTP URL referenced above, with an included username and password, would appears as:

ftp://username:password@ftp.rumpus.com/bigfile.sit