[thelist] web page extensions

[Jackson Yee]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Joslyn" <mark.joslyn at solimarsystems.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 13:42
Subject: [thelist] web page extensions


> I was just wondering how companies use landing pages in advertisements
> without a .html, .htm, etc. extension at the end.
>
> IBM for example has:
>
> ibm.com/partnerworld/developer/news/management
>
> No extension... A lot of other companies are doing this as well. I have set
> up some landing pages in the past this way using redirect in the htaccess
> file. This seems like it is not the proper way to do this though.
>
> My question: How do you set up your pages and/or directory structure to take
> advantage of being able to use links without extensions? This is really
> useful in marketing/advertising pieces.

That's actually pretty simple - you just set a

ContentType: text/html

header (or whatever MIME type you want) before the main content, and the
browser will automatically interpret it as such.  Look at

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/content-type.html

for a much more historical and detailed discussion.

Although page extensions are nice, a large benefit of not having them is that
you can switch from one language to another (ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl) without
breaking hyperlinks and bookmarks.  I still prefer the plain vanilla .html
extension though, so that's what all of the .php pages on my site have been
disguised as through mod_rewrite.  ;-)

Regards,
Jackson Yee
jyee at vt.edu
http://www.jacksonyee.com/