Difference between "default" and "index"?

Question

I've got a few different websites, and I've noticed that on the servers that run PHP, index.php is the front page, but in ASP it's default.asp. Is this because one is server-side and the other isn't? I'm a little rusty beyond old-school HTML. :-)

I'm not asking this for any practical reason. It's just really bugging me for the sake of trivia, so that's why I'm asking. :-)

Answer 1

This is entirely dependant upon the web server.

In Windows (the Internet Information Services web server), microsoft has decided to call the default page "default.htm"

In Apache, the default page is index.html

In both cases (as well as most other web servers) you can define the default page to be anything you want.

The various server side programming languages often register default pages with the web server. In most cases, they just add what they want to the list of defaults.

Answer 2

This is because Microsoft have to be different, so when they developed Internet Information Server they had the deafult homepage called default.asp whereas everyone else uses index.*

Usually there are several options which are valid for a default start page and IIS will usually look for index.html if it can't find default.asp.

Most web servers allow you to customise the name of the default start pages the server should look for.

Answer 3

Is there a reason ASP might need/want to make allowances for index pages (either HTML or PHP or otherwise) to be active in the same directory?

I've never used ASP, so I'm not certain on this point.

Answer 4

Possibly, but on most servers you can configure what page is served up when you actually request a directory - which is what you do when you request http://www.example.com/ or http://www.example.com/this/is/a/sub-dir/

So your filename could be beer.php, or mastercard.asp , for instance.