I wouldnt actually switch but rather use a .htaccess file to parse the html files as shtml. This only applies if you are on a Linux server however.
That's good advice. Not because SE's will devalue shtml files, but because you don't want to loose your cached pages or incoming links.
If you are on windows you can adjust the server settings so that includes files can be read with the html extension and skip the shtml alltogether.
Immorta's idea is actually pretty good if you're able to do it. Saves you from having to rename pages, and avoids worry about SE re-indexing. FWIW, the big win with .shtml is that you can do server-side includes, so your pages can be built dynamically from templates rather than purely static whole-page html files. LC
Can anyone give some more information on using .htaccess files, I have used them, but don't understand what I actually did, or why. I like to know why I changed a file, and what it does, and what else it may do for me later.
True indeed. I already did like hundreds of .html pages manually (LOL) before I learnt about .shtml and SSI. Not really sure to convert it because most of the original pages have been cached by SEs. I could risk losing a lot of visitors. But from now on, with newer sites, it'll be SSI or PHP-include all the way. Great stuff.
Try here for .htaccess references/howto's: (Apache 1.3) http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html (Apache 2.0) http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/htaccess.html HTH LC88
Basically create a file in the relevant directory of your server (LINUX / UNIX ONLY) that you want the html to be parsed as shtml and call it .htaccess In that file add the following. You can do a similar thing if you use php but want to show the files as html by doing the following... Hope that helps...