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.

This post has been edited by sandeep: Apr 23 2006, 07:40 PM

I believe that it's the same as with *.jpg and *.jpeg. There are probably many examples, but I realy can't explain why it's like that. However, if you have an index.htm and index.html on you web server, one of them will have the advantage.

Always use .html, the three letter extension was due to Windows 8.3 filenaming convention used in DOS because it could not understand 4 letter extensions or long filenames. html is the proper extension and should always try to use this instead of htm.


Cheers,


MC

I thought there were also some UNIX systems that didn't understand extensions with over 3 letters? I didn't know it was Windows DOS's fault. I read some tutorials that told me to always use .htm because some web servers wouldn't accept the long version. And DOS systems probably wouldn't be used for web servers.

The difference is 1 because HTML has 4 letters and HTM has 3 so 4-1 leaves the difference of 1. Actually as explained earlier by others because extensions used to be limited to three characters (this included email address) htm was used, but now html is better to use for two reason those systems that do understand four letter extensions can read it and those that can't will still display, but I don't think there are even any of those machines still around and if they are they are probably too slow to work properly.

Unix never really used file extensions though but they also didn't have a problem with file extensions, they never limited how long a file extension could be.

It wasn't until Windows 95 that thousands of sites started appearing with .htm, though .htm existed, it was more apparent at this time (Windows 95 did not understand long filenames till later versions). All this due to FrontPage and because of the 3 letter extensions Windows always relied on.

There were DOS web servers around, just as Apache can run from just a console. The limitations of DOS however caused the extension problems, which case, everyone just decided to go that way, so that it'd work for more people, but now that things have moved on, and these limitations should not be around, I think it's time to actually go with the proper extension.


Cheers,


MC

Other then the obvious, the letter "L," there's not much of a difference between the two extensions. Most, if not all, web browsers and servers will treat a file with an HTM extension exactly as it would a file with an HTML extension, and vice versa.

This post has been edited by IniX: Apr 21 2006, 03:30 PM

As said mastercomputers, everyone should use .html and as it is already explained way I thin I won't repeat it. because there is no such header as text/htm, just that text/html is being used on most of the browsers I know for html, html, shtml. When I see a website using .htm I think that the webmaster/s etc. are not professional there, htm should be avoided in my opinion.

Never used frontpage, but as I understand it still saves the files with the three letters extension .htm ?

All modern web browsers will treat text/htm as text/html. It's the same. No one cares anymore. Usually people put .htm for lazy sake.

xboxrulz

Htm...is just a shorter way of writing HTML, but both are the same type of extention file name. But it is best that you use html because like many before me have said it is just a lazy way of writing the extension. And it can be that much more work to add an L at the end can it?