When to use .XHTML versus .PHP ???

[amy.damnit]

Is there a fast-and-steady rule of which file extension (i.e. ".xhtml" or ".php") to use on a web page??

Obviously is all the code is XHTML then you use ".xhtml"

And if the code is all PHP, you use ".php"

But what if I have a Registration Form where 80-90% of the code is XHTML with just a little PHP sprinkled in??

(In therory, you could name any web page with some XHTML as ".xhtml" as long as you made sure to encapsulate your PHP as <?php .... ?> right?!)

Thanks,


Amy

[siteguru]

Wrong.

If you have any PHP code that needs processing then the file extension MUST be .php

(Unless the server has been set to map the .xhtml file extension to the PHP parser - which would be unusual).

[LarsK]

Well, you can use another extension, but as siteguru says you have to tell your server that it has to parse it like PHP (perfomance will not boost ). I think the other way around is better: name it .php and let i.e. Apache do the job to rewrite the URLs if you want to have another extension shown to your visitors.

[Dan Grossman]

I have actually never, ever seen a file saved with ".xhtml" as the extension. ".html" and ".htm" are common, but not ".xhtml".

[risoknop]

I have actually never, ever seen a file saved with ".xhtml" as the extension. ".html" and ".htm" are common, but not ".xhtml".

This. I hear of *.xhtml extension for the first time.

[AnthonySterling]

Come on guys, the both know fine well what Amy meant.

Personally, whilst not a complete REST advocate, I think the URI should represent the content being served.

So .html for me, regardless of the server language being used.

[AlexDawson]

Amy, the simplest way to go about it is to side with the others above... If it uses a server-side language, then use the appropriate server-side extension (so for PHP you would use .php) the reason for this is because even the .php extension can read and parse (x)HTML (it will recognise both the HTML and the PHP code) where as if you provide .htm / .html or .xhtml (yes I have seen this used) it won't recognise anything apart from the HTML

[felgall]

If you are using HTML and XHTML on your site then .xhtml is the obvious extension to use for the XHTML pages (you just need to make sure you add the appropriate line to your .htaccess file so it gets parsed correctly as XHTML instead of HTML).

You can use whatever extension you like for whatever you want as long as you set it up to parse correctly. All my .html pages contain PHP while my .htm pages only contain SSI.