.html or .htm or .php - which is better?

Anon

I am working on a large site that is using php for ALL pages.

I was wondering which file extension should I use. I heard some stuff about .php pages does not rank well (at times) in certain search engines and .htm files are not pure.

So that leaves .html files which I see is the extension used by most of the larger sites. I was also thinking that .php is not scalable if suppose one day I wanted to move to jsp or even cfm.

So what do you guys (and girls, if any 🙂) recommend? .html for its "pureness", .htm for its (asp people seems to like it b/c of the 3 letter ext.) shortness or .php?

Best Wishes.

tennisguy

Anon

tennisguy,

I would probably go with .php because..... well no particular reason, except that I like to name documents by the type they are. So if I used asp, then I would name it .asp. For the search engine, are you planning to submit every URL in your site to the search engine or just the main index document? If you are going to submit just the front page, then you can name that .html (or using a link from index.html to the .php file). That way the search engine will, hopefully, accept it.

just my thoughts....(hope it helps :-)
Sridhar

Anon

doing .php is nice as in a way you are promoting php but it's a personal preference. i personally despise .htm , please no more .htm! when i see .htm i assume the site was created with frontpage.

Anon

when i see .htm i assume the site was created with frontpage.

So what's wrong with a warning label? :-)

Anon

please no more .htm! when i see .htm i assume the site was created with frontpage.

Well that's pretty stupid of you to assume that! Just because it's got a 3 letter extension instead of .html 4 letter extension doesnt mean that it was created with frontpage!

Anon

I find .htm kind of annoying because I usually don't like many choices when it comes to extensions (like when php3 was released, I always ended my php files with .php and I used to use a pre-configured apache config file which treated php3-type files only if the filename had a .php3 extension -- so I had to manually change the config :-)

But anyways, .htm does not sound like it was created with frontpage since I used FP to create my high school's web site and I named all my filenames with a .html extension.

Its weird. It is usually okay if we name HTML files with .htm (Hyper text Markup), but people usually don't accept .vrm (Virtual Reality Markup?) or ... .sgm (Standard Generalized Markup?). So why should we bother cutting off the "language" part on the HTML extension but preserve it on other types like sgml or vrml? Why not name them all ending with an 'l'?

Anon

.htm doesn't actually mean it was made by FrontPage.

I look at the source code and look for horribly twisted code.

That means it was either created by FrontPage, or a mental patient on a horrible acid trip.

Or both.

However I also detest .htm extensions. I would like it because it was a 3 letter extension (which is logical), but every time I see .htm I think the page was made 2 or so years ago.

It reminds me of when most of the pages I looked at were .htm, and web hosts often never used .html.

Then, as I was getting into HTML, the main "thing" came to be using .html.

So I've used html since...nearly ever, and it just looks weird to me to use anything else for .html.

Personally though, I use an extention that tells me what the file is. php for PHP (and I hate the php3 extension...go figure), jsp, asp, cgi, and pl (for non-cgi perl files), etc.

It would seem a bit confusing if your html file was actually a PHP file.

But that's just me, cause I'm weird like that.

Like I'm not a fan of RTF files, just because the .rtf extension makes me think of something that isn't a text file. I don't know what, just not text.

While we are on the subject, I also have great dislike for .jpeg. Dag nabbit, it's .jpg. Only markup languages should have 4 letter extensions if you ask me 😉

And only C/C++ should use the hackjob looking .h files.

And the next time I see a .z file, I may just snap.

Sick, isn't it?

Anon

How about Lotus Domino files? They end in .nsf, which always reminds me of a National Sanitation Foundation label on a garbage can.

Anon

Or do like me and %@#! with people and have your server parse .asp as php so when people see .asp they think its in asp and actually its php. I say call them whatever you like and let the content and functionality determine whether the site sucks or not.

Anon

i call them all .php because then my text editor automatically loads up the correct syntax highlighting scheme :-)

--
rad

Anon

.nsf would just remind me of the "Non Sufficient Funds" charges my checking account keeps giving me.

---JH

Anon

As much as I like your idea that your content and functionality
should determine it, I would hate the have any of the success
of my sites that use PHP be erroneously attributed to that
Other Scripting Language.

Anon

Is that what that means?