Should I put .htm at the end of my urls?

Question

The tutorials I'm reading say to do that, but none of the websites I use do it. Why not?

Answer 1

I presume you're reading tutorials on creating static html web pages. Most sites are dynamically generated from programs that use the url to determine the content you see. The url is not tied to a file. If no such dynamic programs are present, then files are urls are synonomous.

Answer 2

The .htm extension is an abomination left over from the days of 8.3 file name length limitations. If you're writing HTML, its more properly stored in a .html file. Bear in mind that a URL that you see in your browser doesn't necessarily correspond directly to some file on the server, which is why you rarely see .html or .htm in anything other than static sites.

Answer 3

If you can, leave off the .htm (or any file extension). It adds nothing to the use of the site, and exposes an irrelevant detail in the URL.

Answer 4

There's no need to put .htm in your URL's. Not only does it expose an unnecessary backend detail about your site, it also means that there is less room in your URLs for other characters.

It's true that URL's can be insanely long... but if you email a long link, it will often break. Not everyone uses TinyURL and the like, so it makes sense to keep your URL's short enough so that they don't get truncated in emails. Those four characters (.htm) might make the difference between your emailed url getting truncated or not!

Answer 5

none of the websites I use [put .htm into urls] Why not?

The simple answer would be:

Most sites offer dynamic content instead of static html pages.

Longer answer:

The file extension doesn't matter. It's all about the web server configuration.

Web server checks the extension of the file, then it knows how to handle it (send .html straight to client, run .php through mod_php and generate a html page etc.) This is configurable.

Then web server sends the content (static or generated) to the client, and the http protocol includes telling the client the type of the content in the headers before the web page is sent.

By the way, .htm is no longer needed. We don't use DOS with 8.3 filenames anymore.

To make it even more complicated: :-)

Web server can do url rewriting. For example it could redirect all urls of form : www.foo.com/photos/[imagename] to actual script located in www.foo.com/imgview.php?image=[imagename]