One of these things are regarding how to format a URL.

This post isn’t really server-technically focused, as it is more a discussion of an idea. I’ll none the less assume that the reader has some familiarity with mime-types, basic webserver-settings (like handlers and URL-rewrite-techniques).

Why

As far as I’m concerned, any URL should give a hint of what you will find there, and by stripping the file-extension and just sitting left with something that’ll look like a directory, or using the scripting-language’s extension, I believe that we works against this. File-extensions gives an important hint regarding what the content is. What do you expect when you see “.jpg”, “.gif” or “.png”? Yes, images. Then what about “.html”, “.txt” and “.odf”? It’s most likely some kind of text, perhaps formatted. So what does “.php”, “.py” and “.aspx” tell us? Not much – it mostly a directive to the webserver, telling it to use some kind of parser to compile/process the contents before outputting it. And it might output html, xml or pdf as well as anything else.

A couple of years ago it had a “coolism” about it, saying that “I know how to develop fancy websites”, but nowadays people mostly expect some kind of interactivity anyway.

How

All relevant webservers today have to possibility to map any kind of extensions to any kind of (supported) language-parsers. I.e. with Apache you can use the AddType-directive like this:

addhandler php5-script html xml json

- to parse all .html-, .xml and .json-files in the given directory as PHP 5.

Now, let’s say you have an API which allows you (or perhaps other users), to query a service for information – and allows it to be delivered in xml, json and html. This is usually solved by adding some parameter like “of” (output-format) or something like that in the request to tell which format you’d like. I prefer to keep everything as logical and reducing the need to look up in manuals as far as reasonably possible, so instead of sending GET-requests like this:

http://example.com/gateway.php?id=15&key=11341&of=xml

http://example.com/gateway.php?id=15&key=11341&of=json

http://example.com/gateway.php?id=15&key=11341&of=html

I’d rather prefer:

http://example.com/gateway.xml?id=15&key=11341

http://example.com/gateway.json?id=15&key=11341

http://example.com/gateway.html?id=15&key=11341

This applies just as much for those sexy search-friendly URLs – just append .html to that pretty URL. Google says that it atleast won’t affect negatively on your ranking – so why not?

Possible problems

There are some obvious problem to this approach:

1: What if you want different parsers (let’s say php and python) for different files but which will serve the same kind of output? How do we tell the server which to use when?

- Possible solutions to this is to either separate them in different folders (the cleanest approach), or expand the extension to ie. .php.html and .py.html. Perhaps in combination with some mod_rewrite-kind of tricks.

2: What about the overhead for static files, which still is sent through an interpreter although nothing is changed?

- If you are running a service which is sensitive to these kind of margins, you should just use dedicated servers or CDN’s to deliver the static content no matter what.

3: How far shall we take it? Should we use extensions like .html5 and .xhtml etc?

-  I do believe that these differences are mostly relevant to the software parsing them, so in these cases it may suffice with keeping with i.e. .html, and use the MIME-type to send further details.

Summary

Although all my examples might not pinpoint all the benefits I do believe that there is an idea in keeping the file-extension, both to assist external users as well as might reduce some clutter.

What are the pros and cons of an approach like this? I’ve barely touched a few in this post, but I hope I was able to mention some of the most essential ones.

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In a day that’ll probably save enough time to go and get me a nice cold beer. Mmm! Ah, those little things

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Some of those are pretty logical – like an empty array compared to 0 or false, returns true – but others not quite that logical.

Example

// returns true
"string" == 0;

// returns false, as probably expected of the above as well
"string" === 0;

I assume this is because the string is typecasted to integer, and (int) “string” will give 0. So as we know how PHP’s typecasting is working, it’s easy to understand why “123string” == 123 will return true as well.

Related reading

• PHP type comparison tables

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I came recently across some ads by Komplett.no via Google Ads. The title read “The Legend Of Zelda?”, which – when clicked – took the user to direct search in komplett’s catalog. Too bad the search returns zero hits. Rephrasing the query to “legend of zelda” instead of “the legend of zelda”, though, will give results (an entry named “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess”) .

So, tip of the day:

Make sure your ads are linking to something meaningful.

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