I have a confusion. While surfing on the net, I had been through various travel sites who have a small search engine on their home page. This makes thier homa page .aspx while they still manage to maintain other pages to .htm Why don't they call their search engine in <iframe> and have their home page in .htm as well. This will help them keeping their site static, as static sites are given a bit more preference over dynamic sites. Are there some technical issue behind their such structure or can we conveniently call a search engine in <iframe> at home page? The confusion arised because most and major travel agent's site haven't done this. Its not possible that it didn't came to their mind.
Maybe there search engine uses Full Text search for the database and so ASP.NET is required to code a server side call to the full text DB.
Yes there is a technical issue. They are using .net to impliment that search engine. What is the URL of that site?
Server side coded pages can still appear static to the outside. The only place this can be a disadvantages is with urls using "?" (dynamic) But everyone, given they can configure their server, can easily make e.g. PHP generated pages appear as .html pages.
I generally make my static pages have a .php extention for the posible inclusion of server side code. Its a habbit now. I don't think theres anything wrong with it
The only issue with using the .php extension for static pages is that they're still run through PHP for processing. It may just take a small fraction of a second to check for PHP code in the page but it can eventually add up with heavily accessed sites. Most likely their entire site is database driven and the html pages are generated by a cron job on a regular basis using the database.