Differences between HTM / PHP / ASP?

Question

What's the difference between these web page extensions? There's .htm, .asp, .aspx, .php. In terms of creating a new web page, what's the different between saving it in each one of these formats?

Thanks!

Answer 1

HTM: Short for HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, from the days when file extensions on Microsoft Windows machines could not be more than 3 letters long.

PHP and ASP: Both are scripting languages.

ASP (Active Server Pages) is a Microsoft animal and thus usually only runs on IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Server).

PHP: (PHP Hypertext Processor - a recursive acronym). Far more popular, especially in hobbyist circles, though I recommend it to business clients as well. Works very well with the Apache web server, and integrates with the MySQL database server, all of which are free open-license products and thus more popular and commonly available on web hosting services.

Finally, many of the popular web software solutions called Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogs and discussion groups are all written with PHP/MySQL. Have a look at Drupal, Joomla, Xoops and WordPress, for example...

Answer 2

The difference between the different file extensions are interpreted differently by a computer's file system or web server software. Whenever you open a file with a given file extension on your local file system (by double-clicking on it), there is a default program associated with that extension. The program that is typically associated with .htm or .html files is a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. So, when you open something like some_page.htm or index.html, it should show up in your browser as a web page.

Now, you can give your files an extension of whatever you want. However, for every extension, there is typically a different program associated with it. On my computer, if I open an .asp or .aspx file, it will open with Visual Studio (so that I can edit it), while if I open a .php file, it opens with a different editor (on my computer it opens with a editor called PrimalScript.) On your computer, you may not even have a program associated with a particular file extension (or the extensions might not even be visible to you.)

In Windows, you can find out (and change!) which programs are associated with the various file extensions. To do that, open up Windows Explorer by double-clicking on "My Computer" or by right-clicking on the Start button and selecting "Explore." Once Windows Explorer opens, choose "Folder Options..." from the "Tools" menu. Finally, choose the "File Types" tab to see the list of file extensions and their associated programs.

Now, when you request a page or file from a web site, you need to specify its extension (like .htm or .php or whatever) so that the web server software can locate it on disk. The web server software (such as Apache or IIS) has its own understanding of file extensions. When it receives a request for, say, an .htm file, it just sends you its copy of whatever it has on disk. However, when it gets a request for, say, a .php file, it executes the code in that file and sends you the HTML (or image or whatever) that the PHP (or ASP or ASPX or whatever) file generated. Often times these pages grab data from databases to build some HTML on the fly but the page does not contain the data from the database. These dynamic pages send you HTML that your browser can understand as if you had requested a simple .htm file. The type of data that comes from the page is revealed to the browser from the server using something called MIME types but I won't go into that.

Since this is getting a little wordy, I'll just wrap this up by saying that you should probably save all these as .htm (or .html) files until you understand how to write programs (and then you'll start saving them with whatever file extension the web server expects.) Clear as mud, right? Good luck.

Answer 3

htm is the file extension used for web pages such as index.htm or index.html php and asp are programing languages use on servers, the latter means Active Server Pages, html mean Hypertext Markup Language.

Answer 4

Except HTM, that is HTML just truncated name, don't exactly get why anyone truncate that name, but HTML is purely client-side meaning the page is transmitted to you in its entirety without any modification and let your own machine process and display it.

The others you mentioned are server-side scripts, or programming on the server, what those files have is not meant to just transmit and process by your own from zero to end. But they have programming codes that tells the web server to produce a viewable HTML in memory and transmit that page generated on-the-fly to you and your machine process and display that HTML.

Answer 5

Nikon's Nikkor lenses are specifically made for Nikon cameras and to take advantage of all the features of Nokin cameras. The Sigma and Tamron lenses are good, but they are just generic lenses that have an F-mount to put on Nikon cameras (or other types of mounts for other cameras). The difference in price is probably due to differences in features. Since you did not give any specifics about the lenses, I can't be sure. However based on the features of the lens the prices can vary significantly, even different lenses made by the same company.

Answer 6

What's up, just wanted to mention, I enjoyed this discussion. Very valuable answers

Answer 7

I have asked the same question 3 times, and didn't get an answer