Sites without .html extensions?

[e7e]

Hello

I see some webpages don't have an extension like .html, .asp or .php for example: http://somepage.com/MacIsGood Can someone please explain to me

How you can make your site like this? and Whats the point of this method?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Bostonaholic]

Webservers can identify (in a config file usually) the default name of a file to look for in any given directory. For Apache, which serves the majority of the internet, the default page is index.html Which means, http://somepage.com/MacIsGood is actually looking at http://somepage.com/MacIsGood/index.html (for my example).

As for the advantages to doing it this way? I don't know other than naming conventions and consistency.

 

[jakeOSX]

some of the CMS's use a 'clean url' strategy.

so something like:

myurl.com/blog/thisthing

is really

myurl.com/index.php?feature=blog&entry=thisthing

this is done with .htacess and the specific PHP files.

 

[e7e]

Interesting, do you know any tutorials or guides? I tried to google, but didn't find anything useful searching "sites without extension" does this method have a name?

 

[autorelease]

URL rewriting. Search "mod_rewrite."

 

[Bostonaholic]

When I was hosting my site on my computer I had something like this

www/
  index.html
  css/
    [css themes]
  php/
    [php scripts]
  images/
    [global images]
  blog/
    index.html
  photos/
    index.html
  vitae
    index.html
  contact/
    index.html

This way, I could simply link to www.domain.com/blog/ and www.domain.com/photos/ to go to my blog and photos respectively without explicitly giving it the name of the html file.

 

[bootedbear]

Java-powered web applications (server-side Java, not applets) can map URLs to whatever they want.

 

[Consultant]

Those are mostly used by php servers. When the server is set up that way, if you add performance (caching) functions, you can be served the .html instead of .php without SEO hit nor user thinking something is up.

People, those URLs usually have an ending "/" such as this

Bruce Willis is Mac user
http://obamapacman.com/2009/09/bruce-willis-actor-producer-mac-user/

 

[e7e]

Thanks for all the tip and explanations, I am going to try this out.