Why do some people turn their asp.net pages into HTML pages when published?

Question

I was just told that I might have to work on a project where i will be working with ASP.NET 3.5 and C#. Someone in our team said that we should change all the pages to HTML when we publish the site. So instead of having www.test.com/Page.aspx we will have www.test.com/Page.html

So what i would like to know is:

A.) How can this be done and with what tool?

B.) Why should this be done and what can we benefit from it? (Was told to prevent hackers to get it)

C.) Is this recommended?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

B) The only reason I can think of to do this, is to hide an obvious identifier of the server side technology that you are using. However, this is security by obscurity and that should never be your only and primary security measure. If you want to do it for aesthetic reasons or something, fine, but don't expect it to hold off a determined hacker.

Answer 2

A) You do it by changing Web.config:

<system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
        <add verb="*" path="*.html" type="System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory"/>
    </httpHandlers>
</system.web>

B) The reason would be to prevent viewers from knowing what runtime is behind the site, but in most cases with ASP.NET, it's easy to recognize from its additions to the HTML (such as view state etc.)

C) It's up to you really, I wouldn't say it's good or bad.

---

In response to your comment below:

It's possible that you need to specify a buildHandler as well:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true">
      <buildProviders>
        <add extension=".html" type="System.Web.Compilation.PageBuildProvider" />
      </buildProviders>
    </compilation>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add verb="*" path="*.html" type="System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory" />
    </httpHandlers>
  </system.web>
</configuration>

Answer 3

I was a contractor on a large motoring site, and we were asked to not dislpay any file extensions at all, because the company (a very very large news agency) didnt want to appear to pick one technology above another to its investors and suppliers - it was purely a business desicsion, not a techincal or a security by obscurity attempt.

Answer 4

A: With MVC over ASP.NET you can create a route which you can map to virtually any type of URL you want.

 routes.MapRoute("Route1", "Foo/{Cat}/{SubCat}/{Record}.html", new { controller = "Foo", action = "Record" });

Answer 5

C) There's no recommendation for or against it, but you should be careful when you make *.html passed to ASP.NET because it will cause additional overhead when what you actually want is just static HTML page (no server side processing).

Answer 6

It could potentially be for SEO reasons. Google doesn't like urls like this:

longurl.com/index.aspx?id=1&time=3&this=2

It might be that the member of the team wants to route the url's differently so that Google is more likely to pick them up.

longurl.com/index/1/3/2.html

Don't ask me why google prefers this, but it just does. If I were to have stab though, it likes to know that content is there. The top link is obviously dynamically generated and not always likely to be there.

Of course if this is for an internal web-app, it could be to try and prevent the users from messing about with the URL string and breaking the site.

EDIT: In summary, as can be seen by the above answers too, there are potentially more than one reason for this. Security from hackers seems like a pretty poor reason, however. If the code is robust enough, no matter the form of the URL it would be safe.

Answer 7

B) C)

If the urls are public, you should put in url's relevant information, and things that are unlikely to change in the next 10-20 years (or more..), and that would be:

• a short description about the presented page

These things may change over time:

• ids - if you port the data to other systems
• .html .php .jsp .do .aspx if you change the technology
• /controller/view/main if you rearrange the structure of your site

If the urls are private, it doesn't really matter how you construct them, as long as it helps your application.