Technology · 2
What two-letter file extension, ubiquitous in early 1990s web pages, identified HTML documents and was required by older DOS-based servers that couldn't handle longer extensions?
Answer
.htm
Early web servers running on DOS and Windows 3.x systems were limited to 8.3 filenames (eight-character names, three-character extensions), so HTML files were saved as .htm rather than .html. Unix-based servers could handle .html, but .htm became a common sight throughout the early-to-mid 1990s web.
💡 Did you know?
The .htm vs .html split caused endless broken links in the mid-1990s, as web authors switching servers forgot that what worked on Unix often silently failed on Windows.
Other options people guess
- .web
- .hml
- .net
Topics
- 1990s
- world-wide-web
- html
- web-history
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