Is there some real difference to the layman between html and hml at the end of a web address? Or, should the layman forget it and simply accept it? - Jinx
I’ve never seen hml at the end. If you’re referring to html vs. htm, it’s just the site creator’s preference. No difference.
It could be qqq as long as it is associated with an HTML rendering program like your browser.
Correction! It’s HTM. By the way, I had a website change http to https! What’s that all about…? And then, it couldn’t load the page, afterall. - Jinx
HTTPS is secure HTTP. It’s the same protocol, but with a layer of encryption. This is what most sites use when asking for your credit card number or other stuff that people don’t want to send in plaintext.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, which is the basic language used to write web pages.
Because some operating systems prefer three-character extensions, it is occasionally shortened to .htm
There is no difference between the .html and .htm extensions other than the number of characters.
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the basic system for transporting pages across the web.
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, a newer protocol with more security used by some e-commerce sites.
HTTPS:
HTM vs HTML:
I think “.htm” is a leftover from the era of PCs-before-Windows95.
Windows 3.x and DOS restricted you to eight characters, a period, and three more characters. Because many people wanted to create web sites on PCs instead of Macs (and weren’t inclined to install some flavor of Unix to accomplish the deed – there was no Red Hat Linux to make that easy back then, btw), they had to violate the convention of using “.html” as the file extension and substitute the closest 3-letter equivalent, “.htm”
There’s no real reason to do so now.
I’ll add that the file extension is meaningless as along as the server recognizes it as something. Hence we get .PHP (which as a user looks exactly like an HTML file with the .PHP extension, but to the server means something else entirely).
Back in the early days, the browser seemed to also be dependant upon the file extension. You could open a pure text file with no extension that contained HTML code, and you’d see the HTML code instead of the rendered page. I think that modern browsers don’t do any of that – anyone confirm if it’s MIME types from the server/OS or if it’s part of the HTTP header system? Or are they the same?