On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
There is a .htm page,
The bogus dumbed-down extension for people and programs that can't
handle the correct .html extension...
It's the *people* that are the problem; the software can cope. But on
one point I would have to quibble with you: there is no "correct
extension" in URLs. The content-type of a WWW resource is determined
- according to HTTP specifications - by the HTTP Content-type header:
and that's official. And pffffft to anyone who behaves otherwise
(Opera, that means you, too...).
The apparent filename extension in a URL has nothing, directly, to do
with it (although it might have internal significance to the web
server - but it could equally be .shtm or .php or whatever and still
produce a text/html content-type). There doesn't even have to be a
filename extension (in fact, if you use Apache MultiViews, it's better
*not* to have one).
Sure, the .html extension is certainly *conventional*, and - like all
such matters - there are advantages in going along with what's
expected, unless you find some major net benefit to be achieved by
doing things differently. And the .htm extension seems to be a "dead
giveaway" that the information provider is a serf to the Empire...
I was using ".html" URLs when my HTTPD was running on Windows/3.1 in
1994. Many times I've seen folks claiming, completely incorrectly,
that URLs hosted on "DOS" filesystems *have* to be like ".HTM", but
this only proves that they are (a) misinformed and (b) don't
understand the distinction between a URL and a filename.
(And, by the way, today's equivalent misunderstandin g is the incorrect
belief that URLs on Windows-based servers are case-insensitive.)
best
