I'll leave you to your opinion. And stand by mine: file under "silly nonsense". And yes, I would doubt that your opinion is "immensely widespread". In fact, if you seriously judge a website by whether it uses htm or html as a filename extension, I have to say I'd question whether your opinion is shared by anyone else at all.
Let me guess: the first server (with the default .htm extension) was a Microsoft box running Internet Information Server, while the second one (with the default .html extension) was a Unix (probably Linux) box running Apache I may be wrong, but the above deduction has a 90%+ likelihood of being right. See my point?
Nope. The first was Unix. That was setup with .htm as the default. I then moved it to an NT server (no changes). Then a Windows 2000 server. I then moved it to a Linux server. That was the one that was set up with .html as the default.
Fair enough. Let's end it here... and no hard feelings You're free to poll programmers, and especially self-proclaimed elitist coder nerds, to see what they think. (And naturally I don't judge a website by its file extension, I judge it by its content, informativeness etc. But the file extension or the CMS or lack of CMS used on the site will certainly influence my assesment of the technical competence level of the site administrator. What else would you base it on )