h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

a relatively unmentioned, but very annoying problem is the html filetype.

while it is true in general that it doesn't matter if your html is in .htm or .html files, it gets critical with complex sets of pages.

if you use .html and make your stuff interlinked, then the .html ending results in every link being a broken link on some microsoft operating systems (I don't know about non MS os's).

If you can stick to 8.3 for the filename, and especially use .htm as the type, then it will work across multiple operating systems identically.

I try and cover that in the ongoing revision
although I always go for the .html myself, but I always use unix servers

it doesn't really matter what servers you use.

if the site is usefull, eventually someone will put it on cd. at that point, it might be use offline, on a microsoft os, at which point all the .html endings will be truncated and fail to work.

it is (in my humble opinion) better practice to use .htm unless there is a good reason not to. this particularly applies for complex interlinking projects, and projects that link to file.htm#name type links across file boundries.

This can be particularly annoying in linux documentation (especially install guides which only work under linux because of this bug).

Which versions of win are effected ?
cos win 95,98,ME all handle .html just fine

perhaps late versions of win95 with ie5.5 handle href="silly.html#test" fine, but older versions get it wrong.

in particular, the one with these versions get it wrong.

windows 95
4.00.950
ie 5.5.00.2314.1003

it also matters as to which version of windows was used to burn the cd's as well.

win98 burned cd's can be spectacularly bad.

ok, i'll try to cover it.

Re; another conversation ... dosn't openVMS have a posix layer? I don't remember it being on your list

it's not on my list for a simple reason, I had never heard of it before now.

I will have a look and see what I can find out.

check out
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/
&
http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/os/#vms

also http://freshmeat.net/projects/freevms/?topic_id=144 (not sure about this one )