Not a good idea for the average website. If you're running
amazon.com then there would be a reason to do it but for most of us maintenance
would be an issue.
P
Hi,
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Christopher Kennon
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 9:28 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [WSG] file extensions
Below is the url and excerpt from the passage in question. I've tried it and it works. The images are displayed, but someone looking over the code commented that it appeared that an image was used, but the extension was missing. Thus the question was inspired.
Chris
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/effective-website-acceleration/2
18. Remove or reduce file extensions.
Interestingly, there really is little value to including file extensions such as .gif, . jpg , .js, and so on. The browser does not rely on these values to render a page; rather it uses the MIME type header in the response. Knowing this, we might take:
<img src="">
and shorten it to:
<img src="">
If combined with file renaming, this might produce:
<img src="">
Don't be scared by how strange this technique looks; your actual file will still be sA.gif. It's just the end user who won't see it that way!
In order to take advantage of this more advanced technique, however, you do need to make modifications to your server. The main thing you will have to do is to enable something called "content negotiation," which may be native to your server or require an extension such as mod_negotation for Apache or Port80's pageXchanger for IIS. The downside to this is that it may cause a slight performance hit on your server.
However, the benefits of adding content negotiation far outweigh the costs. Clean URLs improve both security and portability of your sites, and even allow for adaptive content delivery whereby you can send different image types or languages to users based upon their browser's capabilities or system preferences! See "Towards Next Generation URLs" by the same authors for more information.
Note: Extension-less URLs will not hurt your search engine ranking. Port80 Software, as well as major sites like the W3C, use this technique and have suffered no ill effects.
On Saturday, June 12, 2004, at 03:34 PM, Jason Turnbull wrote:
Just finished article from a reputable web site, specializing in best
practices. They suggest omitting the file extensions .gif , .jpg and
.png from image files for bandwidth conservation.
Chris, Whats the URL for this article. I'm finding it hard to grasp the
reasoning, does it save on bandwidth as the images don't get displayed?
:-)
Regards
Jason
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