html vs. htm

I can't believe this thread is still going. Hmm. How can we make this dead horse more miserable?

C++ sucks. Real programmers use C.

Emacs is for mindless wussies. The only editor a real developer would consider using is vim.

[American] football is clearly better than soccer.

Star Wars is tons better than Star Trek.

Dogs are better than cats.

c# is clearly better than Java, because it has goto.

Brown sugar is better than white.

AC electricity is obviously superior to DC, so no one should ever use DC.

What have I missed?

(Hey, don't say that the subject didn't warn you!)

 

On that note, someone once said that "if you can't read uncommented assembler your no real programmer", and Bill once said that a 10Mb harddrive would be enough for anyones entire lifetimes worth of files

 

Yeah, true.... but firefly/serenity trumps them all! Joss Whedon is the new George Lucas! hehe

 

they're equal
I like .html

 

By "validation" I assume you mean conformity to W3C recommendations. There's a reason my sites don't conform to W3C -I think a lot of it is baloney. Stick around and read a few other threads here on that subject - I really don't feel like repeating it all.

All that means is that some servers set .htm as the default and others .html as the default, a point which was already made earlier in the thread if you had read it. That doesn't mean they aren't "equal" or that they are "unequal". That just reflects a decision made by whoever installed the server software. It can also be overridden rather easily if you wish.

 

Considering the fact that browsers care mostly about the headers content value being "text/html", .minnie is as good as .htm or .html

 

The difference can go deeper than that, which is why I said they're not necessarily the same, although it is unlikely. If I have a server set to parse .htm as SSI, or PHP, or PERL, whatever, when .html is not, then they are definitely not equal. Many PHP scripts were being distributed years back with PHP3 extensions.... for all intents and purposes equal to PHP, until someone tried to run them on a server that was configured not to parse .php3... same situation.

And sites should validate if you want to be sure of compatability into the future if for no other reason.

 

This is splitting hairs... or grasping at straws. Either way, you know full well this goes way beyond what this thread is about. You're just wasting time and space.

That's assuming those W3C recommendations (which have been recommendations and NOT standards for almost 6 years now) will ever be adopted to the extent that the elements that W3C identifies as "deprecated" and recommends be dropped (which include such basic tags as <B>, <I>, etc.) are indeed acted upon. I think that's unlikely.

You like W3C recommendations? Then use W3C validdation. Knock yourself out.

Do you need to validate to W3C recommendations to have your pages display well in all existing browsers? No.

Does validating to W3C recommendations make one whit of difference to search engines and to the vast majority of human visitors? No.

 

If you say so. You were stating it as an absolute, that htm=html. I simply pointed out it's not.

They'll never be adopted as long as you perpetuate the lack of standards that have caused problems over the years by just ignoring it.

It's not a case of liking...it's a case of working to standard to make things easier for everyone. And I will work to them whenever I can, thanks. Not that I do this for a living, it's just a hobby to me.

Depends what you want to classify as "well".

The major coders make sure they're compliant. Jelsoft make sure vBulletin is compliant (although I note this site is not ), I think I'll follow their lead rather than yours

 

Double post. Whoops.

 

You are playing with words whose meaning you do not truly understand. Each version of HTML, including the very latest, has been both a recommendation and a standard. The W3C produces a specification of HTML. It then recommends the specified language be adopted as the standard language for describing documents on the World Wide Web. Since browsers have been moving towards compliance to the specification and away from the Browser Wars, the W3C's specification is more a standard today than it was six years ago.

You're right, they probably won't be dropped. The W3C and the browsers have both kept backwards compatability as a necessary goal. But you are not required to use them simply because they still exist. Better methods have been created that are well supported in today's browsers, which makes such elements redundant.

(A small note, however: neither the B nor the I elements have been deprecated, though I personally believe they should be.)

Are tight sentences and good grammar required for communicating your ideas to the reader? Not really, but it helps. At the very least these attributes help distinguish a professional writer from an amateur. Similarly, syntactically and semantically correct HTML is—or at least I believe—the mark of a professional Web developer.

In some cases, no; in some cases, yes.

The majority? Probably not. But why exclude anyone when you don't have to? Especially when the very same practices that would include such people also make a site more adaptable and maintainable.

 

In conclusion, they are the same, its only personal preference.

 

I haven't had a chance to see either one, but I've heard good things about firefly.

 

No one will ever need more than 640K of RAM.
Windows will never use preemptive multi-tasking. Users who want that can use OS/2.

 

I switched to .htm and have stuck with it for years, it is a simple matter of making the choice and *I* feel you should use one OR the other but even that doesn't make a difference except for simplicity's sake.

I can't remember the reason why I decided on .htm but I remember at the time it was important and I remember deciding to never switch back to .html Likely some file-extension incompatibility issue perhaps for 3rd-world countries with antique computer systems, or perhaps there exists the OS doesn't recognize 3+ letter extensions? Who knows...

Odd thing is, every once in a bit I catch a request for index.html on my site... It's the only page catches this on a regular (if infrequent) basis. I haven't found a great solution to this problem other than to keep both an index.htm AND index.html file on site. When I make a change, I Save it then Save As, then upload both...

Other than that there are a few files on the site contain the .html extension, it's too many directories, too many files and internal link references, what is must be and what exists is thus like that (or something along those lines).

next thing you know, it will be .phpl

 

as they've said, there are no difference between the two except that .htm is the older version. at the time of pre-Windows DOS extension, there were only 3 characters allowed for the extensions that's why .htm is used.

 

Whatever. This has to be the most pointless debate ever in the history of pointless debates.

While we're blaming Microsoft for "forcing" people to use the three-letter version (htm = hypertext markup; instead of html = hypertext markup language), let's not forget to also blame Microsoft for:

.PDF
.PHP
.XML
.JSP
.CFM
.SWF
.MP3
.GIF

and all other three-letter extensions in the history of extensions

 

RE: This has to be the most pointless debate ever in the history of pointless debates.

 

Wow I'm surprised how long this thread has continue on for!!!

 

Actually, .html is the older version. The first HTML document and the first browser were born on a Unix machine where there is no restriction on extensions. The very first Web page was .html. There was no need or desire for anything different until DOS systems required an alternation to the extension. (This is not meant to place blame, but it is a fact of history.)