When dealing with so many clients as I have over the years, and lots of them being primarily Windows users, I’ve come to a point where I can’t stand hearing incorrect definitions of FTP.

It seems like Microsoft has incorrectly impressed the idea of FTP in so many of its users’ heads. Many clients and friends ask me about having an FTP area. An FTP area doesn’t really exist!

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which means it’s a way of transferring files back and forth. FTP is actually just a program, like everything else that runs on a computer.

Compare FTP to HTTP. Many are familiar with http://www.example.com. HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. What this means is that it’s a way of transferring hypertext data. Hypertext data simply put is just HTML. It’s not that complicated, but there are lots of intricacies to it.

Here’s a quick example of some simple HTML (HypterText Markup Language):

A few notes

<p>Here's a few notes that I gathered at a lecture I recently attended.</p>
<ul>
    <li>Germans make good German beer</li>
    <li>Hops were originally added to beer as a preservative</li>
    <li>Wheat beer is best unfiltered</li>
    <li>Use an anchor to <a href="http://google.com">link to google</a></li>
</ul></pre>


Take a minute to look it over. It's quite simple. The <h3> is just a heading, same as you'd have in a Microsoft Word document or other word processing document. The 3 denotes that it's a level three heading. You could also have <h1>, <h2>, <h4> and so on up to <h6>.

The <p> simply encloses a paragraph.

The <ul> represents an unordered list. And the <li>s represent items within that unordered list.

I've also included an <a> tag, which stands for anchor. This is how you'd create a link to another website.

So hypertext really just means metadata, in this sense. It's data that describes the text in which it's embedded. So the hypertext <p> and </p> says that its enclosed text is a paragraph. Same with the unordered list and list items. Pretty simple enough to grasp, huh?

Now onto FTP. Again, FTP means File Transfer Protocol. And again, this means that it's a way of transferring files. It's a program that allows a user to put and get files to and from one computer to another.

Hundreds of times I've heard Windows users use the term FTP Area for our files. Well, you can't really have an FTP area, since it's only a way of transferring files to and fro. You can have a file area. You may decide to access it using FTP, if you'd prefer. There are other ways of accessing these files other than using FTP.

FTP is pretty rudimentary, but it does allow the user to do everything she needs to do when it comes to transferring files.

So please, understand that an FTP Area doesn't, and can't, exist. It's that simple.