The Blog that Noone Reads

Just noticed this on Ars Technica. They’re using .ars as their file extension in their urls. I started seeing this custom file extensions a few years ago when developers wanted to mask the server technology they were using by replacing .php or .aspx with something less meaningful.

That’s all well and good, since the resulting content sent to the browser is actually HTML and not PHP. The one detail that’s missing is that the file extension is meant to be meaningful. There are places where that file extension is used as a hint for how to treat the data. For example, if you save that html file to your desktop, you won’t be able to double click to open in your browser because the operating system has no idea what a .ars file is.

The buzzword of the season seems to be “semantic web.” Let’s not just put meaning into our markup. Let’s put meaning everywhere possible. It makes our content more valuable. Why not try .html?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.