But in a shared environment, which is where the vast majority of sites actually are, all the users on a site would have to stop using .CFM extensions on their coldfusion pages if you were sending .cfm pages to PHP. That just isn't practical. And it would PREVENT people moving their coldfusion sites into that system without extensive re-writing. Not just changing filenames, but also all cfincludes references, all custom tag calls, CFC component calls etc.
Similarly the other way, if you configured the system to process .PHP files through the cold fusion server. Everyone would have to stop using .php extensions for their php files, thus preventing anyone copying a .php site into that system without re-writing it. Most of the dynamic sites on the net are actually in shared hosting environments, not on owned or dedicated servers. I cant see the point in this standard. It seems to offer a tiny advantage for a vast cost, if all you want to do is get rid of .cfm extensions on file names, and .gif and .jpg extensions on images. On the other hand if what you want to get rid of is the ?randID=12324587&clientID3212345 kind of thing, then dump PHP and go with ColdFusion. It's a piece of cake. There's no need to pass variables from page to page as a URL string unless you want to. You can do it internally using two methods - session variables or client variables. But to get back to the standards aspect - I cant see the point in having non-standard installations in a shared hosting environment just to meet this W3C standard, which doesn't seem to provide any benefits apart from saving a few bytes in bandwidth. Cheers Mike Kear -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Ellis Sent: Sunday, 13 June 2004 9:58 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] file extensions Hi The portability of URI's is an important point here: as discussed, if a web developer wants to move from X to Y server side language yet retain the URL stucture then this is the way to go, in Apache it's just a simple matter of telling it how to handle certain extension-less files. That said, you should be able to set up a server to handle PHP scripts with .cfm extensions via the PHP interpreter and vice versa (as an example). I wrote an article over at the Sydney PHP Group on doing this with Apache, shared hosting or otherwise, questions welcome offlist or post to that group. http://sydney.ug.php.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=61 HTH James ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
