"Removing" .html from the end of site address - html

I want people to be able to type in this:
http://www.example.com/store
Instead of, say... this:
http://www.example.com/store.html
Is there some file somewhere that I can change so the user is redirected the "non-.html" address to the .html one? I would imagine that users would much rather type in the "non-.html" address than the other one.
I have full access to the site, so whatever needs to be changed can be changed. I just don't know how to do it.

You can do it. You are looking at "URL Rewriting" in .htaccess file. There are many different techniques for doing it. Have a look at this example.
Hope that helps.

http://www.example.com/store/index.html would be one solution. If you visit example.com/store, your browser would automatically load the index.html file.

You need to Google/Bing URL Rewriting within the context of the framework and web server you are using. This is a very large topic since every framework/server combination has a different way of achieving what you want.

If you aren't using a web framework, or you don't know what an .htaccess file is, the simplest way might be to do it with directories. If you create a root-level directory named "store" and move store.html into it as index.html, like this:
/
--store/
----index.html <- used to be "store.html"
then the url http://site.com/store should work like you want it to.

Related

Pre-Linking Pages in HTML Before Uploading

I am currently creating a website with over 700 pages and I would like to be able to link them together before I upload the files to my host server if possible. Is there a good way to link pages together pre-upload without for sure knowing what the final URLs are going to be?
I am working in and plan to upload/manage my website files through Dreamweaver.
I have seen the prompt in Dreamweaver to update links before. If I link the file paths now, will it update to the URLs when the site is uploaded?
you need to use root-relative links. do some searching on that. as long as you don't change your file structure you will be good where your site is run.
instead of using absolute links such as http://www.website.com/folder1/page1
you would use /folder1/page1
as long as your root was where you started the paths from you can start with "/" as above.
there are some instances where you would do a relative link from a certain folder to another one ../folder1/page1 this is not something i would recommend here.
good luck and comment on this if you have more questions.

Multiple index.html files inside folder structure

I just came up with an idea. Instead of using an .htaccess file to remove .html from the URL, why not just use a simple folder structure and in each folder add an index.html?
For instance:
example.com/index.html → Home
example.com/about/index.html → About
Now simply use a hyperlink on the homepage to the about folder, since typically index.html files are opened automatically.
The upside of this kind of navigation, is that it would be easily possible to create sub pages with no crazy database / .htaccess setup.
Now my question is: is there any reason not to create a webpage like that and is it legitimate to use multiple index.html files?
I appreciate all the help.
With the index.html route, there would be three URL's that can access the same page. For example for an about page:
www.yourwebsite.com/about
www.yourwebsite.com/about/
www.yourwebsite.com/about/index.html
Using the .htaccess file would likely give you more benefit from an SEO perspective. You can tell the search engine which one to use, by using 301 redirects. See more about how Google does this here:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Of course you could set up your website using folders and index.html's, and still
use the .htaccess file to take care of the SEO. But, depending on your sites size and structure, this might be more work.
The only downsides would be having to create a folder in addition to a file whenever you want to create a new page, and having to take more time to navigate into a folder in order to edit a page.
As long as you are using Apache, or a similar server software, multiple index files will function normally and be served from each folder.

Is it bad practise to start links with "/" in html?

My website code sample:
<a href=/post/64/page-name><img src=/img-folder/2015/09/image.jpg></a>
<div id=cont2><a href=/post/64/page2>page 2 link</a></div>
My first question is, can I start links just with /? Is it a bad practise? because all website sources that I looked it starts with www.website.com/... not just /
Second question is quotes. It is not needed since html 2.0, but is it important in the example above?
My website is having some problems on google to show correctly... may it be because this problems?
It isn't bad practice. A URL starting with / is merely a relative URL that's relative the the base path. You're using it just fine.
Another example usage is when you want to reference a CSS or JavaScript file and you're deep down into the path.
<script src="/scripts/main.js"></script>
Then, no matter where the user is on your site, they'd always request http://example.com/scripts/main.js. Where example.com is your site's domain.
Additionally: Always quote attribute values. (attribute="value" and not attribute=value).
/ means start of where you are currently. So if your resource is located under same directory, you are allowed to use / to start with. If you refer to external resources, you can't use / to start. (E.g. www.google.com means google website, while /www.google.com means folder under your current directory named www.google.com, like http://localhost/www.google.com)
Quotes are needed when you use white-space in your attributes values (e.g. class="my super classs-name that has white-space" | class=my super classs-name that has white-space).
My website is having some problems on google to show correctly SEO stuff. What problems? Your page is not under first page of Google search? It's separate topic about that.
It is not forbidden. When you start your link with slash / it just a path relative to base element.
You can read more about BASE element here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.4
For example, if you are already at: http://example.com/folder/index.html
/posts/index.html would link to: http://www.example.com/posts/index.html
posts/idnex.html would link to http://www.example.com/folder/posts/index.html
if you reference external sources you have to add the full path/adress
if you reference local resources its up to you.(more or less) take a llok at How to properly reference local resources in HTML?
You should use either double " or single ' qoutations - thats a good practise at least.
But you dont have to if there is no whitespace.
When you start your link with "/" its mean that you start from the root directory.
Example: Your website is in the directory /web/html.
When you now start your link with "/" its goes to the root folder. In this case the web folder.
I know this is old and answered, but it came up on Google when I was searching for something similar, so I just wanted to add to the answers.
Sometimes, when I need to do something real quick with simple HTML site that doesn't require a server, I usually just open index.html in Terminal to quickly preview the page in browser. However when you open your site like that, using the leading slash to load resources (ie. /js/main.js) won't work. That's because when you load your website by opening a file in your browser, the browser takes the root of your drive as the base path for your website.
So if you have your files like this for instance:
drive/Users/username/Documents/www/index.html
drive/Users/username/Documents/www/js/main.js
And you reference your script like this:
<script src="/js/main.js"></script>
The browser will think you're actually pointing here (if you open the file directly in browser):
drive/js/main.js
Because / in this case means drive and not the website's root (www in this case) folder as it would on a server.
Nope, it is not a bad habit to put '/' when starting links. But not having a quote in every html attribute? I don't think so. But i would suggest to put quote(") in every html attribute for it to be more readable.

Hiding page names in the browser

When we launch a website, we usually see webpage name (menu.php or admin.aspx) but I would like to hide that name and show only virtual path or just website name. I don't want it for the first page because I did that with default.aspx but I want to implement it for the whole website.
Showing www.abcd.com/faq/ instead of www.abcd.com/faq/faq.html
Note: My code is not MVC code and server is Apache.
Use .htaccess to rewrite the URL. Millions of tutorials are out there for that ;)
What you are asking is achieved using (for xampp, wamp, lamp or any other apache powered webserver setup) htaccess rewriterules. The rules take the URL and break it into parts that can be modified or used as variables to feed other pages - whilst still keeping the URL you typed. Neat huh!
Showing www.abcd.com/faq/ instead of www.abcd.com/faq/faq.html
call the file placed into the folder faq simply index.html (not faq.html) and then www.abcd.com/faq/
will display the page without the filename. (Make sure, you have defined index.html as a valid Directory index.)
There are more options with using mod_rewrite etc - but since you seem to use a prety static directory based navigation layout, that would be the easiest way.

Changing the location of the index.html file in Doxygen output

I'm using Doxygen to create html output.
I'd like to customize the output so that the index.html file could be more noticeable, since at the moment it is buried half way down a huge list of files in the html output folder.
For example, if it were moved up one directory to be outside of the 'bits and pieces' html files then it would be much more accessible for others who will be looking for it. However, I can't just ass a line of script to copy it to that location, since all of the links it has would break.
If I could configure Doxygen to have the index file go to a different location, or if you can think of another solution to my problem, I'd be grateful for your response.
Thanks
I would leave the documentation in its place and instead use the meta refresh option of the HTML language. Place a file, for instance called, "Documentation.html" in any folder you want with the following content
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;URL=RELATIVE/PATH/TO/index.html">
As I mention in comments to the OP the easiest solution is probably to create a symbolic link or shortcut to the index.html file generated by doxygen, rather than trying to get doxygen to change the layout of it's output files. This symlink/shortcut can then be placed in the root directory of your project (or elsewhere), pointing to ./html/index/html, and named anything you like to make it obvious to your users what it is.