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Alex Watts
8,396 PointsClean URLs
Hello,
I am creating a website, but do not want the file extension in the URL to show.
This is what I do not want:
www.example.com/about.html
This is what I want:
www.example.com/about/
Thanks!
2 Answers
David Bath
25,940 PointsThe simplest way to accomplish this (with just a plain HTML website) is to create an "about" folder as you have in the URL and then give the page name "index.html" inside that folder. Hosts will default to looking for an index page, but don't typically put that in the URL, so long as your links to that page only refer to the folder and not the "index.html" page itself.
Alex Watts
8,396 PointsHello David,
Perfect! Is this, however, best practice?
Thanks!
David Bath
25,940 PointsHi Alex,
I don't think it's a bad practice. I've used this technique myself. You get clean and memorable URLs this way. You probably wouldn't do this for every page on a website (it would require creating a new folder for every page!), but for the top-level page of each section it would make sense.
Regards, David
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsFor a super simple site it's fine. For a more dynamic site, you would generally have a router, so you could create whatever url you wanted and route that url to a view template, and retrieve whatever data it needed to display to the user.
When I was first starting though, and building basic static sites, this is what I did.
So all this to say, big sites don't do it like this. When you sign up at youtube, they're not created a new folder on their server with your username, but they are routing that url to a view, with data about you.