How to link to pages without the .html extension?

Question

I would like to link to pages inside my website, e.g: Not: mywebsite.com/about.html But: mywebsite.com/about/

I've seen various websites doing this but it looks like they also react differently to things:

Apple.com: apple.com/iphone/ works, apple.com/iphone/index.html works, apple.com/iphone redirects.

Opera.com: opera.com/mobile/ redirects, opera.com/mobile works, opera.com/mobile.html does not work.

Mozilla.com: mozilla.org/en-US/ works, mozilla.org/en-US redirects, mozilla.org/en-US/index.html does not work.

Which leads to another question: Are there different methods for this?

Edit: It seems that Apple uses a folder for every page, e.g. a folder called 'iphone' with an index.html file inside it? But Opera and Mozilla use something in the .htaccess file?

Answer 1

Removing Extensions

To remove the .php extension from a PHP file for example yoursite.com/wallpaper.php to yoursite.com/wallpaper you have to add the following code inside the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L] 

If you want to remove the .html extension from a html file for example yoursite.com/wallpaper.html to yoursite.com/wallpaper you simply have to alter the last line from the code above to match the filename:

RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] 

That’s it! You can now link pages inside the HTML document without needing to add the extension of the page. For example:

 <a href="http://whatever.com/wallpaper" title="wallpaper">wallpaper</a>