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HTML Tutorial
Web Design - Site Management
Using a Web Browser to Download from Anonymous FTP Sites
If all you intend to do is download from anonymous FTP directories, rather than upload to your own directories, you might not want to use WS_FTP at all. Virtually all web browsers support connections to anonymous FTP sites, allowing you to download files from these sites while also browsing the web.

We will use the Netscape browser for this example, but the concepts are the same regardless of the browser you use.

When you specify an FTP site you want to login to using Netscape, you include the name of the host computer and the name of the anonymous FTP directory, just like you did in WS_FTP's session profile screen. In the above example, our FTP host computer was:

shell.rmi.net
and the directory was
/pub2/bwood
We can add the FTP host system and directory together, like so:
shell.rmi.net/pub2/bwood
To get Netscape to connect to the FTP site, however, we have to give it more than just the host computer computer name and FTP directory name. We have to tell Netscape what "type" of site it will be connecting to. We do this by adding a "protocol" prefix at the beginning of the host system and directory sequence. For FTP sites, the prefix is "ftp://" (as opposed to the more familiar "http://", which would indicate a web site). When you add the prefix, the host system, and the directory name together, you get an "URL" (uniform resource locator) that you can connect to using your world wide web browser. An URL takes takes this form:
prefix://host/directory
Our example, from above, would look like this as an URL we could plug into a web browser:
ftp://shell.rmi.net/pub2/bwood
Let's try it.
  • Start Netscape.
  • Click on File and Open Page....
  • Fill in the dialog box with
    ftp://shell.rmi.net/pub2/bwood
  • Click on Open to connect to this FTP site.

When you are logged into the anonymous FTP directory, you will see the same files and folders you saw when you used WS_FTP, only Netscape will display the files slightly differently.

  • Find the vertical scroll bar on the right side of the Netscape window
  • Scroll down to the ytdqb.rtf file.
  • Click on the ytdqb.rtf file.
  • If the Unknown File Type dialog box opens, click on Save File, otherwise, go on to the next step.
  • The Save As... dialog box will pop up. To save the file into the current directory, just click on Save. To save it to a different directory, click on the down arrow button just to the right of the Save In dialog box and select another directory.

This file should now download to your hard drive, as demonstrated in example 3, below.

Example 3

[Downloading from an anonymous FTP site using Netscape]

Note that, if you had known the name of the file you wanted before you started, you could have logged into it directly, using this URL:

ftp://shell.rmi.net/pub2/bwood/ytdqb.rtf
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