.. and you definately know they’re there! You can SEE them sitting snuggly in the folder complete with their correct number of bytes, via your FTP client, so why not in your browser?

The answer is that you probably uploaded them using the incorrect method of transfer.  The choice is: ASCII or Binary.  ASCII is an acronym for: American Standard Code for Information Interchange, although don’t be fooled by the word ‘American’, it is an international standard, which means it should probably be called ISCII.

An ASCII file is a binary file that stores ASCII codes. An ASCII code is a 7-bit code stored in a byte. There are 128 different ASCII codes, which means that only 7 bits are needed to represent an ASCII character. For this information, I can thank the good folks in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Maryland for their informative class notes that are first up on a google search.

Most FTP programmes have an auto-detect setting for uploading files.  So if you’re having trouble viewing uploaded files, look for this setting and set it to ‘auto’.