How do browsers determine the homepage?

[chopin2256]

This is a really stupid question, but I never actually thought about this until now, when I want to change my homepage, but I can't, since it is dynamic. How do browsers know which file to load show when http://www.example.com/ is typed into a browser? Is the default index.html? What about index.htm, index.php? Are these also defaults?

What if you want your "index.html" page to not be the default homepage...how would you change that? I want a dynamic page to be the default homepage....is the only way to accomplish this through htaccess?

[marcs]

This is defined server-side. With apache, you can set this either in .htaccess or httpd.conf using :

DirectoryIndex

Example :

DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.htm index.html

This would show index.shtml as the index page, if it does't exist, it will use index.htm instead, then index.html.

Marc

[kaled]

Just to clarify........

The index page (not homepage) of a directory is defined by the server. The browser merely displays the data supplied to it and follows redirect instructions (if any).

Kaled.

[txbakers]

any file can be the index file.