[thelist] web page extensions

Mark Gallagher mark at cyberfuddle.com
Fri Jul 26 20:32:01 CDT 2002


Mark Joslyn wrote:
 > 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.

First off, extensions are utterly irrelevant on UNIX systems - and most
webhosts use UNIX (or a varient), for obvious reasons[0].  The reason we
(usually) use extensions is to make files easier to identify (for
example, Apache knows to send .php files to the PHP interpreter).  If
you create a file named "lalala" with the type text/html and make it a
proper HTML document, browsers will be able to treat is as an HTML file.

The way they're doing it, though, is I suspect creating a directory
called "lalala" and putting in there the file index.html.  Where a
filename is not specified, the sever will usually supply index.html or
index.htm (in the case of Microsoft's IIS, it looks for default.htm or
default.asp, because Microsoft's other motto is "making things difficult
since 1985").




[0] Specifically: doesn't crash whenver the current day ends in "y",
     unlike certain other systems I could name...


--
Mark Gallagher
http://cyberfuddle.com/infinitebabble/





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