Many times you’ve noticed even Google is accessing
Google.html page, but still you can’t see that, you just see Google.com, and
there are plenty of such example, lets know why?
Simplicity Is the
advantage of technology and keeping the URL http://Google.com
is more simple than using http://Google.com/index.html,
this makes the user to easily remember the URL and does a lot more thing.
Hi everyone, welcome
back to Intelligent Computing,
In day to day web
surfing you can see that the URL ends with .php or .html or .asp
but most of the time you won’t see these extension on the URLs, let me explain
you why and how?
First of all
Why Extensions are hidden in the URLs?
There are many
reason to keep the extension hidden in the URL, they are:
- To Make URL easier to Remember and Type
- It makes the URL look more simple and cleaner
- This Make the URL SEO friendly with keywords.
- If somehow, you ever tried to change the technology, like moving from HTML to php, users don’t have to mistype the URL or even need to notice this.
Many Sites which
uses the Content management system and CGI for generating the pages, make the
URL looks something like this, /index.php?page=this-is-your-content that’s too ugly to remember
or type or look at.
Now a days there are many ways to rewrite these URLs to
simpler form instead of keeping index.php?page= we’ll remove these stuff to keep the things
simple and awesome.
Other things I can
explain here are smartness of browser.
Our modern browsers
like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, are smarter than before. Recall the HTML
file where we start coding something like this
<!doctype html!>
<!doctype!>
We usually specify
the document type i.e text/html
or text/css or
image/png image/jpeg
while designing the web pages. Now when these are sent to our browser, browser
already know what are the content they are receiving and how it needs to be
handle by local resources. Then there is no need to specify the extension of individual
file type in URLs.
Why some URLs are still having Extensions?
But you can also
see some webmasters also keeps the extension of the files on URLs, like text/html would have
extension .html or php file would have
extension .php and
so on.
The reason behind
this is to save the URL in the file system of the local computer as well as server
to work perfectly even if the metadata of the content or say content
type is lost. Browser can read the
extension and work even fine in such cases.
There is no hard
and fast rule for extension handling, it’s all depends upon which program
handle which extensions, so we can also see, even if pages are having php
technology, it will still be displayed as .html keeping the functionality same.
How the extensions are hidden in URLs
To know this, you
should know the entire website have some directory and there is always a
default file to pick from the directory.
Like Microsoft’s IIS
servers have default file as default.hml
or default.asp
while APACHE server uses the index.html or index.php as default file to pick
from every directory.
Suppose there is
home page named index.html
in main directory, than there is no need to type the index.html, server will
pick the default page in directory and similarly in sub directory, just need to
mention / and in
next directory it will again pick default page and you won’t see any extension.
Bottom line
SEO, simplicity and
cleanness says to keep the URL simple and extension free, let the browser use
their smartness and process the pages as per defined in Doctype, in case of complex and technical
sites, there we can use the extension to keep the metadata secure in case of
problem occurs. Hope this post helped you to get the things behind the bar,
share this with your friends and on social sites.
No comments :
Post a Comment