How can you tell what server language a website is using?

[halfasleeps]

I am trying to evaluate a website to give a client a quote for a website I am asked to re-design. All the pages end in .html is there a way to tell what language is being used (eg. PHP, ASP, etc) if any?

Thanks!

[felgall]

No since only the HTML gets passed to the client.

You may be able to tell something about the hosting by examining the headers and should be able to work out what sort of web server the site is running on (which will reduce the probability of certain languages being used). One Apache hosted site could easily combine PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby etc on the one site. One IIS hosted site could easily combine VBScript, JScript, C# and various other .net based languages all on the one site. They mostly can but are unlikely to run on the other server.

[halfasleeps]

Thanks