At 04:54 -0500 14/1/11, Roger Burton wrote:
Also … if the file name is so important why is the ‘home’ page
“index.html” - forgive me if this is a really dumb question … Roger
This is inspired guesswork, but I did build and install Apache and
use Mosaic back in 1994, so I’ve a vague recollection of what the web
was like back then.
HTML was designed initially for collaborative work on documents.
Security wasn’t an issue, so if you browsed to a url that was a
directory you just got a list of the files in that directory -
probably document chapters. If the site author wanted to present a
tidied up list excluding the irrelevant bits they would provide, by
convention, an index.html to give that list - or index. Apache, and
other early servers, made it simpler for users by serving up
index.html if it existed and no file was specified in the url
request. Once public sites were written assuming that name there was
no way of changing it.
You still will get a file list if the server and .htaccess are
configured to do so and there is no index.html, but we usually try to
avoid that.
David
–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
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