in message <
[email protected]>, OG
('
[email protected]') wrote:
>
> "Simon Brooke" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>> in message <[email protected]>, soup
>> ('[email protected]') wrote:
>>
>>> John Hearns wrote:
>>>
>>>> It is not supernumary.
>>>> HTML = hyperext markup language
>>>> followed on from SGML
>>>
>>> Thanks for the lesson on what HTML stands for, however to get that
>>> link to work (Firefox on WinXP)properly the "l" should be removed so
>>> the link ends in htm not html the one with html doesn't work.
>>
>> Because Microsoft are still tied to an operating system written in the
>> late
>> nineteen seventies for very primitive eight bit computers which stored
>> the file 'extension' - essentially file type information - in three
>> bytes.
>>
>> The world has moved on, but trust Microsoft to be stuck in the past.
>
> Neither true nor relevant.
>
> But mainly - if you are directing the browser to a file called abc.html
> you won't find it if it is actually called abc.htm.
You don't direct your browser to a file, you direct it to a Uniform
Resource Locator. The server maps the locator onto a resource, and returns
you the output of that resource. You don't know, and don't need to know,
how that mapping worked. If I, for example, direct you to the URL
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/dogfood/story/article_57.html
does that imply there's a file somewhere on my server called
article_57.html? The answer may become more perspicuous if you note that
the URL
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/dogfood/story?article=57
returns exactly the same thing. And if you then note that the URL
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/dogfood/nitf?article=57
returns the same content in a different format, you may get some idea of
what is going on.
So - in summary - the URL need have nothing whatever to do with a file name
(there is, in this case, no file as such at all). I on the whole
deplore 'filename extensions', particularly as a way of indicating the
content of the file. But 'HTML' at least means something. 'HTM' merely
means 'we're incompetent, and too ignorant to even know it'.
--
[email protected] (Simon Brooke)
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
X-no-archive: No, I'm not *that* naive.