# Web page filename extensions
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-page-filename-extensions/151459
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 28, 2003, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-page-filename-extensions/151459 "2003-01-28T12:20:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Dunmurry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunmurry)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2003, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-page-filename-extensions/151459/1 "2003-01-28T12:20:27Z")
I sometimes see pages on websites with the following extensions:
.stm, .shtml and .asp
Can someone tell me what these mean?
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2003, 12:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-page-filename-extensions/151459/2 "2003-01-28T12:28:02Z")
.asp is Active Server Pages - essentially the page that you view is dynamically created by a program running on the web server; most often there will be some sort of database content.
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### Author:  [@Popup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Popup)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2003, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-page-filename-extensions/151459/3 "2003-01-28T12:43:12Z")
And **.shtml** is often some kind of server-side generated page. For example Apache frequently uses that extension to turn on SSI - Server Side Includes, and other parsing.
The actual contents of the file will in most (all?) cases be straight HTML.
If you look at this very URL, you will see that it ends in **.php** , which almost certainly means that it was created by a PHP script.
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### Author:  [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)
#### Post date: [January 30, 2003, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-page-filename-extensions/151459/4 "2003-01-30T02:49:52Z")
And, in the interests of “teaching you how to fish”…
[Every file format in the world](http://whatis.techtarget.com/fileFormatA/0,289933,sid9,00.html)