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Posted by Carolyn Marenger on 03/24/06 15:00
The Numerator wrote:
> I know a lot about HTML and now I'm teaching myself PHP to make my
> pages more dynamic. However, all this time, I have no clue what the
> difference is between .HTML files and .HTM files. Someone told me that
> .HTM files were newer than .HTML files. Another source said that .HTM
> files worked better with links or something.
A file with a name that ends in '.html' is technically just a file with a
name that ends in '.html'. Windows and some other operating systems
recognise a file type based on the extension. In those operating systems,
the extension .html refers to a file containing hyper text markup language.
In reality any file can have an extension .html, but windows and some other
OSs may have a problem determining the type of content.
The difference between .html and .htm... Once upon a time, microsoft
operating systems had a 8.3 file name limitation. The 8 referring to the
number of characters in the file name and the 3 referring to the number of
characters in the extension.
On my Amiga, the computer that I was using back when DOS and Windows were
stuck with 8.3, and on many other systems, the restrictions were not as
limiting. It made more sense to some people to use a fourth letter to
describe the html file type, since html was already a four letter acronym.
To transfer the file to a windows computer, the fourth character had to be
dropped, thus the creation of .htm files.
As far as better or worse goes, there is a very slight performance
improvement using .htm rather than .html in your file names. The addition
of the single character is one extra character that has to be uploaded when
retrieving the file. If however you are that concerned with bandwidth,
there are lots of other ways to reduce the size of your files, such as
removing excess white space from the live pages. Leave the white space in
your development versions, and just strip it for the live version.
Carolyn
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Carolyn Marenger
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