I've noticed that a lot of the popular sites do a good job in hiding their file extensions.
I guess with the MVC concept, you're really not working with files but more so with views.
I get that, but what are other motivations?
+4
A:
Exposing file extensions can be a huge maintenance headache if you ever switch / upgrade technologies on your website. I can remember quite a few headaches when moving from Classic ASP to .NET and having a lot of .asp links both internally and exposed to search engines that needed to be changed to .aspx.
Ryan Brunner
2009-11-04 16:51:51
Another solution to that problem would be to not use ASP :P
Ben S
2009-11-04 16:54:49
And in 10 years, maybe someone will be posting on FutureStackOverflow saying the same thing about ASP.NET :)(really some people already may be when you consider ASP.NET MVC)
Ryan Brunner
2009-11-04 16:56:41
+1
A:
One reason is security, if someone is trying to hack your site and they can see the file extension they know straight away what the underlying technology is and therefore any known security holes in that technology. Note there are other ways of them finding this out though.
RMcLeod
2009-11-04 16:52:31
+2
A:
- Avoid typing yourself to a technology, if extensions were visible switching from PHP to .net, would mean going from .php to .aspx
- Easy to navigate site via the address bar, It's obvious I can hack this URL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1675131/hiding-file-extensions to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ to see all questions
- Some say that you get better Google results of the URL contains the search term as well
spaetzel
2009-11-04 16:54:56
+2
A:
Because Cool URLs Don't Change. So if there's anything in your URL that is tied to your current technology stack, hide or eliminate it, so that when you change your technology stack, you don't have to change your URLs. Changing your URL may also cause you to lose ranking in search engines.
Push things that may change out of your URLs, aggressively.
Sean McMillan
2009-11-04 17:24:43