HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible, Fourth Edition

Chapter 19. Publishing Your Site

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introducing FTP

• FTP clients

• Notable FTP clients

• Principles of Web server file organization

Now that you have documents to deploy on the Web, how do you actually move the files to the Web server? If you don't have an automated publishing tool (as covered in Chapter 18), you will probably use File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This chapter provides an introduction to FTP and explains how you can use it to deploy your files to a server.

Introducing FTP

File Transfer Protocol was created to easily move files between computers on the Internet. Dating back to the very early days of the Internet, FTP hasn't evolved much in the years it has been in service. FTP encapsulates several functions to transfer files, view files on both sides of the connection, and more.

FTP servers use the same protocol as the rest of the Internet: TCP/IP. TCP/IP is a packet-switching protocol that allows computers all over the world to communicate with one another via the Internet. The protocol uses well-defined ports — data doorways reserved for particular applications — to segregate the types of information traveling over the network. FTP uses TCP/IP ports 20 and 21. These ports are unique to the FTP service, allowing a computer to run a Web server (port 80), an FTP server (ports 20 and 21), as well as other services at the same time.

The FTP server sits patiently waiting for a client to request a connection on port 21. The client opens a port greater than port 1024 and requests ...