There’s an online encyclopedia that I used to cite, but all of the pages were coming up as dead links. HOwever, I recently found one of the articles online. The difference is that instead of .html it has .jsp at the end.
What’s the difference? and why would they have changed it, making it much more difficult to find the encyclopedia?
Jakarta Server Page (formerly JavaServer Page). Dynamically-generated HTML. The URL accurately indicates that the viewed HTML document is dynamically created by the server, so it would be inaccurate to name the URL as an .html file. By convention, those are static HTML documents.
Thanks. The thing I find odd is that by changing to this dynamic version, the individual articles don’t show up in searches, generally. I just happened to find one, on about the third page of the google search, but generally, they don’t turn up anymore. They used to be top hits when I would do google searches in the topics covered by the encyclopedia.
I’m more familiar with php webpages but it’s a similar idea. The website’s server is referencing a data source and actively updating the website with data from the data source on the fly. Each time you refresh the website the content is being pulled fresh from the data source.
They probably changed it to make it easier to update the information on the site. Instead of changing individual html files they can update the data source the webpages pull information from.
This is a case study in why the best practice is not to include any kind of “extension” that indicates how the page is generated in your API’s URLs.
Whether you are getting a static page or a generated one (and especially what specific framework is generating the page) is an implementation detail that the site maintainer should be free to change without affecting external links. But the way that online encyclopedia is set up, they can not.