How to keep file type (like ".html") out of the address bar?

My first post, so be nice...

[pingpong]

Hy everybody!

I'm new around here. I discovered this site because I was all around the web finding an answer to this question. Poped on to webmasterworld.com (and wow!) what a site! I am an absolute beginner to webmastering as I have only been doing this for the last five years, but I only take care of one site which is, obviously, mycompany.com. I am using GL, PS and Fetch mostly. I'm now revamping the site into what I am calling v3.0.

How can I have an address that looks like this in the top address bar:

http://www.example.com/product/

(with out the ".html" at the end)?

I'm all ready pretty good at using folders and files so that addresses look like this:
http://www.example.com/products/one/specs.html

Hope this question fits into the right forum. Once again, this site rocks! (except I couldn't find my answer ;-)

[edited by: engine at 8:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] delinked and examplified [/edit]

[Ove]

Hi and welcome to WebmasterWorld

<How can I have an address that looks like this in the top address bar:

http://www.example.com/product/>

If you use an index file in that folder you will see it right

/Ove

[edited by: engine at 8:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] delinked & examplified [/edit]

[pingpong]

Thanks, that was fast!

Obviously, I should have thought of that. I just call the page:

http://www.example.com/product/index.html
and the page will appear as
http://www.example.com/product/

Which also means that I will have to give absolute addresses to that page in the other pages if I don't want a client to see that address when he commes back to it through other links on my site.

v3.0 is around the corner!

[edited by: engine at 8:10 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] delinked & examplified [/edit]

[pingpong]

I meant

index.html
in folder "product"
of http://www.example.com/

[edited by: engine at 8:10 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] delinked & examplified [/edit]

[Ove]

Yepp that would be fine.

/Ove

[anallawalla]

Ask your host to discover what else is available to you when you learn a bit more and want to try other web server technologies e.g.

index.shtml
index.cfm
default.asp
etc

The server is usually configured by the web host to recognise certain file names and extensions to act as index pages.

[robert adams]

you can't name all your files index or default or home. You can only have one of those in each directory. so unless you are going to have a directory for every single page, your viewers are going to see your page names.

why do you want this?
luck,
robert

[risto]

You can use frames. The content page url is invisible and only the url of a frameset appears in the top address bar.

Different frameset for each product group.

[pageoneresults]

You can also implement what is referred to as Content Negotiation. This would effectively remove all file extensions and allow you to do what you want to do. It does require someone at the server level who is familiar with the procedure and it will probably cost a little to set up.

P.S. As a side note, I would recommend to all that you remove any internal links that include root level file names. For example...

www.example.com/products/index.htm

Should be shortened to...

www.example.com/products/

You never know when the underlying technology is going to change and the last thing you want to have to do is back track and have to update all of those link references. Been there, done that, will never do it again! ;)

[robert adams]

You never know when the underlying technology is going to change and the last thing you want to have to do is back track and have to update all of those link references. Been there, done that, will never do it again!

Good point but I doubt that something as basic to the whole technology of the web as the index.html thing will be changed any time soon.

robert

[PatrickDeese]

I believe you can set your server to send HTML files without extensions.

http*://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

[eldeejee]

The most easy thing (as mentioned before) is just to use a frames page. You can easly set it up to contain just one page. As an example you can take a look at www.ultimate-records.com or www.ultimate-dj-gear.com where the last contains some javascripting to prevent people that enter by searchengines on a specific page to just see the page without navigation and that kind of stuff and contains a frame within frame within frame construction.

[edited by: engine at 8:14 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[pingpong]

Thanks for the input.

What I was looking for was exactly to put an index page in a directory.

I don't want to hide the ".html" in each page, just a few header pages for each category of product. For example, I have product1:
http://www.example.com/product1

The additional pages for additional info:
http://www.example.com/product1/specs.html
http://www.example.com/product1/videos.html
http://www.example.com/product1/prices.html
etc...
As it is not for every page but simply for each product (or product type), this means there is one directory per product. Makes things very clean too. But I must admit, I don't have many products, and each one needs a few pages to show.

Robert Adams, why do I want to do this?
... to pretentiously have my site look a little bit like [apple.com,...] (at least as far as the very basic addressing goes)... ;-)

/thanks_again/

[edited by: engine at 8:16 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] delinked & examplified [/edit]