Replying to HTM vs HTML: Whats The Difference ?

PHP Web Development companyHTM vs HTML: Whats The Difference ?

Btw, the 3-character extension was a Windows only limitation. The web is based on Unix which has no such problem.

-reply by benivolent

Difference between .htm and .html file extension
HTM vs HTML: Whats The Difference ?

Replying to sandeep



Hi Sandeep



Web Brower does not see the file extension instead looking only the content of the file and gives an output according to the code

Functional wise there is no difference but why two extension are there?

1.The Operating systems like DOS and Windows 3.X does not allow to use 4 letters extension. Hence .Htm is used instead .Html

2.In some cases if the server created it's default directory for only supporting the .Html files then .Htm files cannot use on that server



Regards

Tamil





-reply by Tamilarasan

I have always woundered that also. I never actually thought that there was an actual program diffrance between a .html and .htm Maby one is newer and can do more but so far I havn't found a diffrance yet. All the programs that can be run on HTML and also be run on HTM (as far as I can tell). It seam more logical to use HTM because its shorter but I will probably continue using HTML since everone uses it and Im used to typing it. I agree with everyone else, HTM is probably the lazy way to write HTML. A one letter diffance shouldn't matter unless you have to type it in a textbox with <input type="text" maxlength="25"... or something like that. Funny story I was one letter off of having a link on myspace if I would have known this I would have had that last >
Does anyone know the offical reason for this?
Thanks,
Sparkx

hi friends,
Does anybody know the difference between .htm and .html files.
I am wondering why there are two extensions for the same type of files!!
Even some hosts make the index.htm as the home page and some do the other way. Isn't there any standard for making the home page. Some even use default.htm as home page. When the page with different extension is present then it gives a 404 (Page Not Found) Error.
Any light in that direction will be of much help.
Regards.

There really isnt much difference at all, except for one. Usually the main page of a website is called index. If thats the case, then it's usually a .html extension. I have my entire site stored in a folder(and subfolders) on this computer. The main site has one html file(the index), and the rest are htm. I also have 4 subfolders. 2 of them have entirely htm files and pic's. Another is all pics, and the other folder has its own index.html and some htm's. Other than that, it shouldnt really matter nowadays.

The only use for the extension is for Windows to know what kind of file it is. So if you configure in Windows "xxx.bizzarreextension" to be evaluated as an HTML file it will have the same functionallity as xxx.html or xxx.html.

HTML files are just plain text files, wich text follow some rules to accomplish the w3c recommendation for Hypertext Meta Language.

The 3 character extension is due to the 8.3 file name format on some old sistems like MSDOS

I had heard as someone stated above. Some OS's back in the day could only see 3 letter extensions. Therefore it was .htm. Then when the new snazzy OS's came out they went ahead with .html which is a bit more appropriate.

I would also recommending .html, but its up to you. In my experience they are handled the same, but which does it load by default. If you have an index.htm, index.html, and index.php I guess it depends on ur server configuration. I know nothing of that =/.

Between PHP, .asp, and Perl (.pl) it does not matter so much considering html is not used as often as it used to be.

Even if it is on most sites if you type in the domain ( www.whatever.com ) half the time it wont even show you what file your on until you click on a link inside the website.

hi friends,
Does anybody know the difference between .htm and .html files.
I am wondering why there are two extensions for the same type of files!!
Even some hosts make the index.htm as the home page and some do the other way. Isn't there any standard for making the home page. Some even use default.htm as home page. When the page with different extension is present then it gives a 404 (Page Not Found) Error.
Any light in that direction will be of much help.
Regards.

To answer the actual question, there is no difference between the two extentions. I mean there is absolutely no difference between the two extentions. In case you didn't understand what I was trying to say, there is no difference between the two file extentions.

Having made my point abundantly clear, I do have something to add.
Even though there is no difference between the two file extentions since the one is JUST a shorter version of the other or maybe one is JUST a longer version of the other, the longer version is preferable by todays standards which don't really mean too much since the only standard for web design is that there isn't any real standards.
There have been attampts to define standards but the browsers don't care, the browser developers don't care, and the web site designers don't care. This is because making a webste conform to the standards does not mean that all web browsers will correctly display the content nor does it mean that your page will be looked upon more favorably by the search engines or page ranking robots. In fact, trying to make your web site conform to the standards may make it more difficult to make it appear more uniformly accross all of the web browsers available.

I recommend that you use .html but whatever you choose to use, be sure to always use the same extention. This will reduce the number of dead or broken links on your web site.

vujsa

To be sure use html the server will just look at the first three or htm and if you use html will still work. Problem solved. Ha ha ha!

There is probably no right or wrong answer, but now im curious to put a index.htm and an index.html on my server and see which one is called wen you visit the main url

It would depend on your web server's configuration. Apache, for instance, has a configuration directive:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php

With this configuration, Apache will first look for a file called index.html. If it can't find one, it will try to find index.htm. If it still can't find one, it tries index.php. But if they were in a different order, Apache would search for them in that order instead. I'd think most servers these days would have index.html before index.htm, but you never know.

As for .html vs .htm, who cares? I personally prefer .html, but I'm quite surprised at the number of people who consider .htm "not professional" and "lazy". It does exactly the same thing, so what's the problem? Most JPEG files are saved as .jpg, rather than .jpeg - is that unprofessional and lazy?