Just to be clear, it’s not the browser that makes this auto-home-page choice – it’s the server. It’s a fallback position in response to an incomplete URL. When you enter either just the domain name, or just a folder name, like these:
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/widgets
…the server first checks to see if the URL points to a specific page. Since it does not (cannot, the URL doesn’t point to an explicit endpoint, like http://www.example.com/index.html
) the server then first tries to add a forward-slash to the end of the URL, and see if there’s a folder by that name. In the first example, that would get you the server’s root document folder. Since that’s not an explicit URL either, the server then looks into its DirectoryIndex property, which is a space-delimited list of acceptable “home page” filenames. The first one that matches will “win”. Mine looks like this:
#
# DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
</IfModule>
So if a folder contains the file index.html, it will be chosen in preference to the file index.php. If neither of these files exists, then a 404 error is raised and the whole process stops.
That’s on MY server, not yours. Your hosting provider may have configured their server differently, although many (most) are set this way. I point this out because some hosts use IIS (Microsoft’s Web server virus delivery system) instead of Apache or Nginx. IIS is factory-configured to look for default.htm instead of anything else when looking for a directory index page, although many IIS configurations I have encountered are also set to use index.htm or index.html as well.
Walter
On Oct 14, 2013, at 9:35 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:
Basically:
The “Homepage” has either a structure of:
home.html or index.html (both are grabbed by the browser as the initial home-page of a web-site)
Freeway by default names the Homepage index.html
So I suppose, that in the Freeway file your homepage is named in the inspectors first tab “index.html” while you expect it would be home.html
If I can make any advice, ALWAYS use index.html and forget about the other one.
Cheers
Thomas
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