Index.htm and Index.html

[Guest]

Can anyone please tell me what the differents are between index.html and
index.htm?

 

[=?Windows-1252?Q?Rob_Giordano_\=28Crash_Gordon=AE\]

One has an L the other doesn't.

There is no difference except you must use the correct one depending on what your host requires otherwise you'll end up with two home pages which will be confusing to you if you are working and publishing changes to the wrong one...the changes will not show up.


| Can anyone please tell me what the differents are between index.html and
| index.htm?
| --
| Many thanks
| Steve Morley

 

[Cheryl D Wise]

To add to Crash's answer both stand for HyperText Markup Language also known
as HTML. When the web was much younger the file systems only supported a
maxiumon of 11 character file names. There were up to 8 on the left and 3 on
the right side of the dot. That meant that there was no room for the "l" at
the end. Macs supported longer extensions but other operating systems would
simply cut off anything after 3 characters.

So you could say htm is a holdover from the 'old' days. As Crash said it
doesn't really matter which one you except for which extension you web host
has first (or as the only) one to serve as the default file.

Other than that it is personal preference. (Even Dreameweaver on my Mac has
..htm as the default file extension.)

--
Cheryl D. Wise
MS FrontPage MVP
http://mvp.wiserways.com
http://starttoweb.com
Online instructor led web design training - Next Session June 26th

 

[Andrew Murray]

There is no difference in terms of functionality index.htm exists only from
the DOS days where the file name format of 8 char.3 char extention. .html
is from the days when longer file names were allowed (from Windows 95
onwards).

For some reason, FP continues to use .htm for its file names, but there's no
difference, you can easily "File > Save As and rename them to *.html
extensions.

There might be an issue with what you host chose as the "default" index file
name (could be anything from default.htm/html to home.htm/html and including
index.htm/html. Check with them.

My host uses "index.htm" and "index.html". One or other will work.