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

[Thomas Dowling]

 ----
From: Bob Duncan <duncanr at lafvax.lafayette.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Friday, May 16, 1997 2:13 AM
Subject: Home page naming: index/welcome/home, etc.

>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.)

Most http servers define what the default file for a directory is.  Some
servers also allow for a series of filenames to look for, in order.  Here
are the relevant lines in an NCSA httpd srm.conf file:

    # DirectoryIndex: Name of the file to use as a pre-written HTML
    # directory index.  These files are used if a directory is referenced.
    DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml index.cgi

In other words, if an http GET request specifies a directory rather than a
file, send back index.html from that directory (if it's there), otherwise
provide index.shtml (if there), otherwise index.cgi (if there).  If none of
the files are there, provide a listing of the files in that directory, if
not prohibited by other configuration options.

Bob's server is apparently set up with something like:

    DirectoryIndex index.htm welcome.htm home.htm

(Caveat: I don't know what server software is in question here.  This is
just how it would be set up with NCSA or Apache)

>
>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?

(1) No.  Different servers have different defaults, though it's index.html
for most Unix servers.  After that, the presence and order of substitutes
is not widely standardized.  AYSA (Ask Your System Administrator).

(2) Yes, though most will probably accept the default settings the server
comes with.

Another post added:
>default.htm/.html/.htp also works and serves as a home or base page in a
>directory.


This is obviously highly dependent on your server configuration.
Default.htm is the default for Microsoft Internet Information Server and
Personal Web Server, but default.html is not an automatic substitute, and I
have to confess ignorance to what default.htp might be.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu