Home page naming: index/welcome/home, etc.

[Bob Duncan]

This is not critical; I'm just curious.

When I first learned HTML, I was instructed to name my Web
site's "entry" level page index.htm(or html), a convention which
allowed omission of the filename in the page's URL. (i.e., with
the home page named index.htm, /www.school.edu/~myaccount/ would
get you there.) Through observation and searching the Web4Lib
archive I see that welcome.htm serves the same function. Through
brief experimentation with my account, I found that home.htm
also works, and that the server preferred welcome.htm over
index.htm when both existed. (I ceased my file renaming
experimentation when I started getting server error messages.)

My questions: (1) Is there a standard (yeah I know...sorry)
pecking order?, i.e., in the absence of a filename at the end of
a URL, does the server look first for welcome.htm, then
index.htm, then home.htm, etc.; or, if there is no standard (my
guess), (2) is this configured for each server by the system
admin, or is server software preconfigured to look for certain
filenames as default home pages?

Thanks.

Bob Duncan

   '~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'~'
     Robert E. Duncan
     Reference/Instruction Librarian
     David Bishop Skillman Library
     Lafayette College
     Easton, PA  18042
     duncanr at lafayette.edu
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