ANONYMOUS FTP

 FTP URLs are used to point to files located on FTP servers-usually anonymous FTP servers; that is, the ones that allow you to log in using   anything y mouse as the login ID  and your email address as the password. FTP URLs also follow the standard URL form, as shown in the following examples:

ftp://ftp.foo.fom/home/foo

ftp://ftp.foo.com/home/foo/homepage.html

because you can retrieve either a file or a directory list with FTP, the restrictions on whether you need a trailing slash at the end of the URL aren’t the same as with HTTP the first URL here retrieves a listing of all the files in the foo directory. The second URL retrieves and parses the file homepage. html in the foo directory.

NOTE

Navigating FTP servers using a web browser can often be much slower than navigating them using FTP it self because the browser doesn’t the    connection open. Instead, it opens the the connection, finds the file or directory listing, displays the listing, and then closes down the FTP connection .if you select a link to open a file or another directory in that listing, the browser constructs a new FTP URL from the items you selected response the FTP connection by using the new UR, gets the next directory or file, and closes it exactly which file you want to retrieve rather than for when you want to browse an archive.

Although your browser uses FTP to fetch the file, if it’s an HTML file, your browser will display it just as it would were it fetched using the HTTP protocol. Web browsers don’t care how they get files. As long as they can recognize the files as HTML, either because the server explicitly says that the file is HTML or by the file’s extension, browsers will parse and display that file as an HTML file. If they don’t recognize it as an HTML file, no big deal. Browsers can either display the file if they know what kind of file it is or just save the file to disk.

NON-ANONYMOUS FTP

All the FTP URLs in the preceding section are used for anonymous FTP serves. You also can specify an FTP URL  for named accounts on an FTP server, like the following:

ftp://username:password@ftp.foo.co,home/foo/homepage.html

in this form of the URL, the username part is your login ID on the server, and password is that account’s password’s password. note that no attempt is made to hide the password in the URL. Be very careful that no one is watching you when you’re using URLs of this form-and don’t put them into links that someone else can find!

Furthermore, the URLs that you request might be cached or logged somewhere, either on your local machine or on a proxy server between you and the site you’re connecting to. For that reason, it’s probably wish to avoid using this type of non-anonymous FTPURL. Altogether.