lucy24 - 11:35 am on Nov 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

I don't remember Windows allowing four-letter string extensions until Windows 98.

Fortunately I have never needed to worry about That Other Platform's extension format.

:: snrk ::

Weirdly it's only in recent years that I've used extensions at all. I mean in real life, not on the web. It's part of that OS X thing. If I can't see the extension I don't know whethere there really is one, or whether the computer will try to open the file in ... well, I've forgotten it's name but it's some arcane utility that I swear I have never used for any purpose. Adding insult to injury, it will then tell me that application X can't open this file and in fact won't run on this computer at all. Well, I never ASKED it to open the file. Hmph.

Every URL request is rewritten. The default server action is: RewriteRule (.*) /$1 [L] It's hardly a great effort to alter that default URL to file mapping.

But you still have to take a conscious and deliberate action. With directory-slashes it happens without any human involvement.

Oh, and I guess it's time to put in a reminder that we didn't invent computers. For every 87-year-old getting their first tablet there's someone like my 81-year-old father who probably still speaks fluent Fortran though he hasn't had to use it in a good many years. You know the type: the ones who will happily spend two hours running up the code to do a one-time job that you could do by hand in 45 minutes.

Never got past BASIC myself. Any other language, including php and javascript, I'm in "three words and the rule for forming plurals" territory.

But I still expect to see
:: exerting superhuman strength to turn back to thread's original topic ::
an extension at the end of a www page name. Query strings, no, yuk. But a modest html is always in fashion.