QUESTION

I am using your book Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML and I have a question that was not addressed in the book. How do I create a link to a file that I want people to be able to download? I tried using <a href="filename"> but that opened up the file instead of doing a download. Is there an easy way to accomplish my task?

ANSWER

Ahhh. here's something that is a bit tricker than you might initially realize. The best way to do this is to place the file in an FTP archive on your machine (or any other machine, of course), in a spot that's accessible through anonymous FTP, then use a link like:

ftp://hostname/directory/file.name

so, for example, if I wanted to make the file 'coolweb.zip' available to everyone via a Web page, and it was on the host "ftp.intuitive.com" in the directory "pub/sourcecode", I'd use

ftp://ftp.intuitive.com/pub/sourcecode/coolweb.zip

as the URL for my link.