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Possible Duplicate:
.htm vs .html

What is the difference between .html and .htm file extension in a Basic Web Page?

Community
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Starx
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5 Answers5

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None. I believe .htm to exist only due to the MS DOS limitation of 3 characters for file extension, which then propagated as a bad habit to early windows versions and programs.

Miguel Ventura
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    3-char extensions did not originate with Microsoft. – John Saunders Jun 13 '10 at 10:58
  • @John: No, but Microsoft's MS-DOS certainly made three character extensions infamous! Besides, HTML did not even exist when operating systems that predated MS-DOS (such as CP/M) were popular. – Derek Mahar Jun 13 '10 at 12:31
  • sufficiently infamous for people to forget their history and think that History started with MS-DOS. It didn't. There were reasons why MS-DOS used 8+3. It was copying several earlier small OS's. CP/M for one, but then CP/M copied earlier systems, some of which also used "PIP" to copy files. – John Saunders Jun 13 '10 at 13:13
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    @John, I think you meant @Derek :) Still, I'm not blaming Microsoft on anything. I was just referring the MS-DOS limitation that propagated to Windows' early versions because I believe it to be the most influential regarding this issue. Most other 8.3 systems never got to taste the dawn of the interwebs. – Miguel Ventura Jun 13 '10 at 13:44
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There is none. HTM is the shorted version invented by microsoft for their old 8+3 file format, where each file could have only 8 characters in the filename and three in the extension.

ZeissS
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notihing , you can find your perfect answer here htm/html

sirvan
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  • While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. – ProgramFOX Mar 05 '14 at 17:08
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Whether a URL refers to an HTML page or not depends on the server's content-type not on its file extension. For instance htpp://www.google.com/ returns HTML even though no .htm or .html can be seen. You could even configure your web server to make this URL: http://my.server.com/foo.jpg return HTML instead of a JPEG image. As far as URLs are concerned file extensions do not have any meaning.

Erik
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Basically, None.

.htm used to be normal when the length of the extension was important (in the days of 8.3 letter filenames) but that has not been an issue for a long time and .html is more common today since it is more descriptive. So far as the web is concerned, you can use any extension you like or none at all (so long as the server is configured to send the right mime-type) - the extension is only an issue on your local computer.

Caesar
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