Is there a difference between htm and html?

I remember this thread from another forum, so here is a fairly good description.

Quote:

Back when people where still connecting to the internet using windows 3.x, and DOS 5/6 it was important to make sure that your file names followed the DOS 8.3 naming convention
Where the first part of a file name could be no more than 8 characters long, followed by a . then followed by the extension that could be no longer than 3 characters long.

example:

index.htm
would be valid, but
myindexpage.htm
or
myindex.html

Would be invalid file names under the dos file system.

Now that almost everyone connects to the internet with an OS that can interpret larger file names, it is no longer important to follow that standard, and you are free to use either .html or .htm as you please.

I'd forgotten the 8.3 syntax! If I want my site to be usable even for people using old machines, possibly with 3.1, should I stick to the 8.3 convention?

I doubt that there would be that many people still on 3.1. The restrictions on software and such being too much of a reason to update.

The biggest development curse isn't older machines as such, it is the browser wars that get us. Personally I haven't heard of any problems with our sites vis-a-vis O.S problems.

companies like Compaq and Microsoft do not worry about it. The fact is with most sites utilising server side content delivery with 3 letter extensions, ie asp, and the amount of traffic these sites see, if they dont have a problem then neither should I.

Anyone got another take on this?

I wanted to post two points about this:

1) I just checked TWF's site stats for the month of March and currently, it has over 7,000,000 file requests. Of those, 44 came from a Windows 3.1 machine! I was actually surprised it was that high. I would bet it was the same individiual. At this point, I really can't believe anyone could still be using 3.1.

2) Also note that several years ago, hosts only allowed one or the other extension. Servers were setup to recognize either index.htm or index.html as the main homepage, but not both (don't ask me why but I have used servers like this). This has all but disappeared now though.

Now, I could see no reason for using one over the other... Maybe use .htm because it's shorter but that's really the only advantage I can...

Some site building software like FrontPage still default to .htm as the extension. Guess they feel they need to be backwards compatible.

I agree. 99.999% of people can handle .html as an extension. Don't worry over it.

If you were a die hard 8.3 person... how would you handle a .shtml file?

You cant : )