Filename of index.html or Similar Default

When a user visits a website through their brower (Chrome, Firefox, etc., the user typically enters a URL such as www.nvcc.edu, www.billpegram.com, etc. The browser then displays a webpage. Of all the webpages at www.nvcc.edu or www.billpegram.com, which page is displayed? The convention is that if there is a webpage at the top level of the site named something like index.html, index.htm, index.asp, default.html, etc., that page is displayed. This convention is useful for three reasons:

• It makes the URL shorter - www.nvcc.edu rather than www.nvcc.edu/index.html
• Some home pages have an .html extension whereas others might have a .htm extension, and if the incorrect extension is entered, the webpage will not be retrieved. So the website visitor does not need to know which extension is required.
• In other cases, the home page of the website might require some server processing other than simply returning a webpage (e.g. accessing a database), and thus the extension may need to be .asp, .aspx, or something else.

The convention is that the name is index.html - not index-1.html, not index-2.html, etc. So if the URL ends in a folder, such as student.nvcc.edu./nvwpegram/hw2, a filename of index-1.html will not automatically display whereas the index.html file will automatically display.

So How Do Names such as index-1.html Come About?

In a Canvas submission where files are attached, I can download files to my Downloads folder by clicking on a download button in Canvas. Say the file is named index.html. If My Downloads folder already contains a folder named index.html, when I download your index.html file, it does not overwrite the index.html file previously in MyDownloads. Instead it gives your file a name of index-1.html. To avoid this, I first have to delete the file in my Downloads named index.html, and then yours will download as index.html. This same issue applies to every file I download, not just the index.html files.

I suspect that when I see files in your Canvas submission named index-1.html, that a similar process occurred at some point in the creation of your file.

Revised: February 20, 2023