what is the difference between an htm or an html page?

Question

Hi, I use Frontpage 03 to edit my site here on yahoo. I'm just confused because there are both htm and html pages created. I'm not sure if/when I was given the option of which to make. the "site" stored in my documents has index.htm as it's home page, and the real website, or remote site as they call it, has it's homepage as index.html. But, on the remote site there is also an index.htm which seems to be linked or synced (sp?) to the homepage, index.htm, on my "site" which is in my documents.
So I just deleted the index.htm off the remote site because I thought maybe it's not supposed to be there and I must have mistakenly made it.
Had I only come here first and asked, because I have faith in the yahoo answers community that we can get this problem resolved. Any answer is appreciated!!!
Thanks

Answer 1

The only difference is the name.

DOS only allows 8.3 filenames, so most extensions are kept to three letters for compatibility with old computers.

But the name of the "default page" has to be the exact name of the file.... doesn't matter whether you use .htm or .html, but be consistent.

Answer 2

AFAIK, HTM and HTML are two different extensions that identify the same type of files.

Back in the Days of Win 3.xx and DOS, only 8.3 names were supported, i.e., the file would have a name which is 8 characters long followed by a period and an extension that is upto 3 characters long. That's how the common extensions exe, txt etc. came into being.

With Win95+ This limitation has been overcome. Windows 95 onwards supports long filenames, ie, you can have a filename which is upto 255 characters long. Hence on these systems .HTML is used in addition to .HTM. Some programs use .HTML for online/hosted pages and .HTM for locally edited/created/saved pages. This is why FrontPage & FrontPage Express use .HTM extensions. It doesn't make a difference anyways.

Answer 3

They are both the same.
htm is short for html

Most programs will use the short version htm.

There is only one thing you need to be careful with.
Either make all of your pages htm or html.
But don't use both as it will confuse you when you need to create a hyperlink.
The bad thing about it is that if your file is htm and your hyperlink look for the file as html, it won't find it. The reverse of this has the same result.
In other words, they are the same from a html point of view, but they are different from a hyperlink address point of view.

Answer 4

As far as i know there isn't a difference. The excerpt below is from a site you might want to try. It goees over htm in simple terms.

HTM or HTML Extension?
When you save an HTML file, you can use either the .htm or the .html extension. We have used .htm in our examples. It might be a bad habit inherited from the past when some of the commonly used software only allowed three letter extensions.

With newer software we think it will be perfectly safe to use .html.

Answer 5

In the beginning, web sites were created and used on computers running operating systems such as Unix. Such operating systems didn't have file name/extension limitations such as MSDOS and Microsoft's Windows 8.3 limit (8 chars for the name and 3 for the extension). Web sites used the .HTML extension for (Hyper Text Markup Language)
As the Internet became more available for PC owners they needed a way for windows users to save pages and create sites and so .HTM was born. This allowed Windows users to create web sites. Now though, windows can handle larger names and extensions and although some windows based web design software default to using .HTM you should stick to the universaly accepted .HTML.
I would ditch FP as well as it is propriotry in some of its functionality meaning that your web site MAY only be accessable by someone using Internet Explorer OR make sure you test your site using Firefox, or another browser.

Answer 6

There really is no difference, the .htm file extension is just a throw back to the days when Windows could only have file extensions containing three letters.

Answer 7

It is basically the same thing. Htm files appeared when early microsoft operating systems (eg. windows 3x) did not support file extensions of more than 3 characters.

Answer 8

.Htm and .Html is a same .
we use .htm for backward compatibility with msdos extension, 8 char for filename and 3 char for extension.

Answer 9

Only the l the files are the identical

Answer 10

there is not any difrent between them htm is tree charactor so it can use in dos mode and html is 4 charactor so it is for windows and both of them can use.