.htm vs. .html

Any advantage?

[chamade]

Firstly apologies if this has been asked before but the search facility ignores '.html' and '.htm' from its results so I couldn't find previous posts on it.

Doing a server header check on www.mydomain.com/index.html I get:-

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 08:45:24 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27
Last-Modified: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 08:39:12 GMT
ETag: "27ea36-9987-3ef95fb0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 39303
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

But for www.myotherdomain.com/index.htm I get only

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 09:22:44 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Would this make any difference for search engines? i.e. with the index.htm file the header doesn't return filesize, last modified, etc. Is one better than the other?

Lastly, am I neurotic?

[chris_f]

In terms of search engine ranking there is no difference. Although, it might be nice to offer them the extra info so that they can run checks.

Lastly, am I neurotic?

I think the question is "Are we [The WebmasterWorld members] neurotic?". The answer is "Yes! And happily so" :)

ATOB
Chris

[PeterD]

Actually, the first one is a lot better. Google recommends you use Last-Modified in your headers. Basically, it frees up Googlebot to check your changed pages rather than just wasting precious spidering time on unchanged pages it already has:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Last-modified as well as ETag also make your pages more cache-friendly:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I'll reserve judgment on the second question!

Pete