/whatever/ instead of /whatever.php ?

[flex4life]

I’m just getting back into web design after a few years and i noticed that page extensions are non existent now.

For example:
https://css-tricks.com/downloads/ instead of something like https://css-tricks.com/downloads.php

I’m not sure how this works, what is going on here? is there some vids or articles I can check out?

[TheDoc]

Since a lot of sites are generated dynamically now, it’s a lot easier to have the system set up folders automatically and place an index.php or index.html inside that folder.

You can also remove extensions via .htaccess:

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
# Replace html with your file extension, eg: php, htm, asp

Why do people do it? It looks a hell of a lot cleaner to me. Which would you rather see in the url:

https://css-tricks.com/downloads/index.php
or
https://css-tricks.com/downloads/

It looks a lot cleaner without the index.php beside it, and it means it’s one less thing for users to remember.

[flex4life]

Thank you I will look into it!

Very helpful

[JoshWhiteDesign]

One thing to note is that I’ve found certain hosting providers give certain limits to what you can do with htaccess. On my godaddy hosted site, nothing I did to the htaccess stuck, but on my MT hosted account it works just fine.

[Author]

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