Force
download, hide
pathThis is an article about providing downloads on a website. It describes common webmaster issues when it comes to file downloads and it will discuss several solutions. Some of them are easy to implement, others require a little technical background and programming skills. But in
end, everyone will have a suitable solution for his problem.
If someone wants to provide a download on his website, one can find following instruction note beside
link:
Right click on
link and from
context menu, select "Save Target As" in Internet Explorer or "Save Link As" in Netscape/Mozilla.
If you search in Google for "right click" "save link as" OR "save target as", you will get around 1,750,000 search results. It seems to be very common in
web.
The reason for this is that several file types are opened directly within
browser window (JPG, GIF, MP3, MPG, AVI, PNG, TXT, PDF, and of course HTML). Other file types start an extern application (XLS, DOC, PPT). It depends on
operating system,
browser software and
plugins
visitor has installed and while opening those files instantly might be
intended behavior in many cases, sometimes you want a file to be downloaded.
One solution could be to pack
file as ZIP or GZIP archive. In fact you should pack all your download files because it can save your bandwidth and reduce
download time for your visitor. On
other hand, packing files like JPG, GIF, MP3, or AVI does not make much sense because these file formats are pack formats itself. Packing these files into a ZIP file will not reduce
file size significantly in most cases.
What is
downside of a pack format like ZIP or GZIP? Not everyone has a software to unpack them on his local computer and therefore you would loose some of
target audience. Especially when it comes to visitors with little experience in using
internet, you end up writing support e-mails instructing visitors how to unpack
ZIP or GZIP archive.
Another solution would be server side scripting. Scripting languages like PHP provide
possibility to tell a browser not to open a file but download it to
visitor's local computer. These scripts force
browser to open
save file as dialogue automatically.