Just came across this page;

 

click for the error

 

It suggest uploading a file, and one of those filenames you can use is home.html. So I started thinking, why is index.html so much more common? Most websites call that first page the "Home" page, not the "Index" page, and yet we name them (seemingly unnecessarily) as index.html?

 

Is there a technical issue, maybe some old browsers dont look for home.html or something?

It's Index rather than home cause Index doesn't always mean the home page. Like in a folder, it is the Index of the folder, not the home of the site. Index is also a term used in programming, and paper books, so i just it came from there.

 

Is there a technical issue, maybe some old browsers dont look for home.html or something?

 

It is the webserver that determins if home.html or index.html is the default page served.

It is the webserver that determins if home.html or index.html is the default page served.

Or to extend on that a little bit, servers are normally configured to accept many variations of a "home" page. A typical list might look like...

 

index.htm

index.html

index.shtml

index.php

home.htm

home.html

home.shtml

home.php

 

...and so on. When a site is requested using a domain url, ie http://www.mysite.com/, the server needs to know what page to serve up. To do this it looks at it's configuration list like the list above - it first looks for index.htm, if that's not found it goes through each variation until it finds a match.

Its basically a big If Else If statement

 

I just thought it was common practice to use index.html or index."whateverformat" and i just think it looks more proffesional?

 

Thats just me, everyone is different.

 

Ben