script extensions advice

[jez]

Hi there,

I am a web developer and i have arrived at work today to find that the script alias for all PHP on the web server has been reset to .html

I have seen this before but i have personally avoided it for reasons of clarity.
Can anyone give me any info on the good or bad of this, our server admin guy is a bit cavalier in his attitude and i am trying to find out myself whether this is a good thing.

Many thanks

JEz

 

[sleipnir214]

I would strongly recommend against doing what your admin has done.

If ".html" is reserved for static HTML pages and some other extension for PHP pages, then the web server can know when to and when not to invoke the PHP interpreter. As it is, the web server is going to run every html page through PHP.

Why invoke the PHP interpreter for every static HTML page on the site? Does his servers have unlimited resources?

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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[Foamcow]

Yes.. that does seem a little, um, stupid.

 

[jez]

Thanks for the reply, I had started to think of reasons why this wasnt so good myself, but i hadnt cosidered that one.

MORE INFO
I spoke to my admin about it and the reasoning behind it was to allow for more of the site be crawled by search engines??? not sure the fact in this....

Search engines do crawl dynamic pages if they are linked to (for eg one i did was

http://www.mysite.com/weather.php?where=town

and each town on the site linked to a weather page specific to it), and on the other hand pages within mini web applications such as an admin area for the site should probably not be listed in searches when their full url (inc query string) is generated dynamically through a GET request.

The solution to this (my admin told me) was to use local .htaccess files to handle the passing of variables through a plain url without query string....again to appear to search engines as static html and thus be crawled better......

I really think this will end in more harm than good myself, as it will rely on the next person who does my job (i am a contractor) to know something about php and apache htaccess files rather than just php. Also search engine stuff is to me a dark art and it is usually better to play by the rules of the engines rather than risk being kicked off entirely.

Thanks again,


JEz