WD97: Invalid Links from Link to Remote File Transfer Protocol

ID: Q174069

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Word 97 for Windows

SYMPTOMS

When you click a hyperlink to a remote FTP site (for example, ftp://ftp.microsoft.com) in a Microsoft Word 97 HTML document and then log on to the FTP server, the FTP page is loaded with a directory listing, but all the hyperlinks on the FTP page are invalid. If you click one of these hyperlinks, Microsoft Word will display the following error message:

   Unable to open <directory or file name>. Cannot locate the Internet
   server or proxy server.

CAUSE

The hyperlinks on the FTP page assume that the base hyperlink is the local cache directory.

Internet browsers use the base hyperlink to locate links to other files. A base hyperlink allows you to insert relative links [or partial Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)] in your document. For example, if the base hyperlink is

   http://example.microsoft.com.

you can insert

   /images/bullet.gif

in your HTML document instead of the full path:

   http://example.microsoft.com/images/bullet.gif

hyperlink results

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

REFERENCES

For additional information about hyperlinks, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q159940
   TITLE     : WD97: General Information About Hyperlinks

Additional query words:

Version           : WINDOWS:97
Platform          : WINDOWS
Issue type        : kbbug

Last Reviewed: February 11, 1999