Why do some website links need .html and some do not?

Question

http://www.planbcoach.ws/meetcoach
As an example for other websites...
Other times you have to enter /meetcoach.html
why is .html not needed?
Is this some other type of file other than an html page?
If it is an html page, how do you make the extension not require the .html.
Thanks!

Answer 1

It is HTML, but it depends on how the server is configured.

For example, URLs ending .php still send HTML to the browser, it just means a PHP script was used to create the HTML.

For URLs with no extension, servers can be set to send the "index.html" file in that folder by default. So, for http://example.com/foo , it would send "index.html" in the folder "foo".

Servers can also be set up ( via something like mod_rewrite ) to re-map URLs into a different file structure. For example, Wikipedia uses this... all the URLs ending /wiki/SubjectName will redirect to the same script that actually builds the page ( or sends a cached copy )

Answer 2

Good question!

The answers are right. The reason why some pages load with the extension .html and others do not, simply lies with the "type" that file (or resource) was written in.

It's like this. Pages you visit within the net can be considered as files or resources. .HTML (your example) is basically a file made through an HTML editor that your browser can read.

Moving along, there are other "types" of pages out there including Java Server Pages (jsp), PERL or PHP (php), Microsoft's Active Server Pages (asp), Macromedia ColdFusion (cfm) and a lot more.

Hope this helped!

Answer 3

The .html stands for what language it may be, and probably how the server should be outputting the page.

Chances are that there is some sort of programming going in the page that either accepts the .html file, or can look at it as a folder.
I know this can be done in PHP. But it's not that easy to understand as an amateur.

Answer 4

There are a couple of things to consider here:
1)
Is it an index page? index pages are handled differently, having an index.html page in a folder makes it be the default go-to page when accessing that folder (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_dir.html#directoryindex)

So, if it is an index page the URL does not need to have the index.html part at the end

2)
Again, with apache it is possible to do some url rewriting (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html)
So even if your URL looks like: index.php?var1=val1&var2=val2
you can make it look like:
mysite.com/var1-val1/var2-val2

so it doesnt look like calling a file while on the back end it is.

And yes, it is a rewrite for scripting languages since html "cannot" take variables from GET

Answer 5

It depends upon (1) how the webmaster has written the website: the target page may have written the target page as an html page, or as a php page, or as an asp page, or as an shtml page, or as... whatever, and (2) how the server at the website's page prefers to serve the page: mine, for example, will allow me to serve my pages as .htm instead of .html whereas Yahoo! insists upon .html

Answer 6

What they did in that example is made a folder called "meetcoach" and within that folder is the index.html page or whatever language they used. If you create a new folder for each page and have an index.html in there you will be able to use the folder name instead of the page name. This also helps in search.

Answer 7

see you later as the two addresses are available in from the host it relatively is clicking the link, it is going to artwork effective. This, needless to say, is how actual web content surely functionality, and have achieved fairly simply by fact the information superhighway began. That pronounced, in case you're making use of a few style of one/3 area hosting provider, you will choose to study over their TOU to be sure the hyperlinks you're putting are permitted. They in all probability are, besides the incontrovertible fact that it relatively is desirable to be sure. on the different hand, in case you're hosting this on your own server...properly, if so you does no longer be asking this question. :P