HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Website organization and navigation go hand in hand. A site that is well orga-
nized is usually easy to navigate. Pages have names that make sense, and iles
are organized into directories that logically relect the website's topic focus. A
poorly organized site, on the other hand, is usually diicult to navigate and
harder to maintain.
Before the introduction of Windows 95, a ilename had to be short—no more
than eight characters for the name part plus a three-character extension—if
you wanted to work with that ile on a Windows or IBM operating system.
Programmers were comfortable using shorter ilenames. hey were faster to
type and less prone to errors, even if they were more cryptic.
Today, there is no reason to abbreviate or shorten a ilename. Because mod-
ern HTML editors and development systems keep track of a website's iles, you
usually have to type in the name only the irst time. A ilename should be long
enough to describe what the ile is all about. his will make the robots happier,
as well as any programmers who will work on the site in the future. On blogs,
where no physical ile for a web page exists, the blogging sotware is oten
conigured to create
permalinks
for post pages by converting the post's title to
all lowercase letters and replacing blanks and special characters with dashes. It
would not be surprising to ind, for example, a URL such as this:
http://myblog.com/ten-ways-to-maximize-your-social-media-marketing/
Macintosh and Windows operating systems handle ilenames with spaces
and other special characters nicely. Web servers do not do so well with such
characters. In URLs, such characters must be encoded. Avoid using any char-
acter in a ilename other than uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, periods,
dashes, and underscores. Besides using saner and more descriptive ilenames,
here are some other suggestions for keeping a site organized:
Use all lowercase letters for ilenames unless there is a speciic reason
not to. his will result in better sorting of ile listings. Filenames on
Windows-based servers are not case-sensitive. his means that a URL
such as http://example.org/index.htm will correctly link to the ile
Index.HTM if it is on a Windows-based server. But the link will break if
the website is moved to a UNIX server.
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