This is not a Government of Canada website
The purpose of this website is to provide a working example of the WET-BOEW-GCWeb theme created by TNG Consulting Inc. together with the Government of Canada for Moodle software . Demo courses are only available in English however multi-language courses are supported.
Naming your HTML file
Default HTML file names
You may have noticed that some web pages don't seem to have file names that end in .htm or .html. In fact, some web pages don't seem to have any file name at all. For example, https://www.google.com/ .
Rest assured that, even though there is no filename specified in the web address, called URL, most web pages do actually have a file name. The exceptions are a more advanced topic not covered in this introduction course.
The reason there can be no file name is that there are some magic file names, called default file names, that web servers - the computer program that sends web pages to your web browser - will look for automatically if no file name is specified.
The actual file name can be different depending on your web server however:
- For Apache and most other web servers, the default filename for web pages is index.html.
- The exception is for Microsoft IIS web servers where the default filename is default.htm.
The advantage to doing this is that, anytime you use the default filename, you do not need to specify the name of the file in a link. This can result in shorter links making them easier to remember. The disadvantage is that default links will only work when viewing pages on a web server, not when you are editing and viewing web pages locally on your computer.