Naming Your Web Files

The rules for naming Web page files are somewhat different from those for naming files on your personal computer.

Name your top-most Web page file index.html or index.htm and reference any other files from within that. (You may also use either the .html or the .htm file name extension for the rest of your html-encoded files.) For new Web sites, we suggest using index.html as the name of the top-most page file; if you prefer index.htm, please be sure to delete the index.html file from your directory.
Do not include spaces in your file names. Without special encoding, a Web browser cannot find a file called myWWW file.html (it reads only up to the space, so thinks it should find a file called myWWW and can't, of course.)
It is best to avoid using characters other than letters, numbers, and the underscore (_) in your file names. Although they can work, special characters such as: $ ? @ # % - [ ] ' , : { } often have other meanings on the Web, and Web browsers can get hung up trying to interpret them.
It is important to pay attention to upper case vs. lower case characters. A file called RoyRogers.html is different from a file called royrogers.html, and different yet from ROYROGERS.html. The case used in a link must match the case used in the file's name.
Here are some examples of acceptable Web page file names:

myhouse.html
our_kids.html
our_1st_puppy.html

house_plan1.gif
map_to_house.gif
horses.gif

MyHouse.htm
our_1st_puppy.jpg
mugShot.jpg

Updated 2002-09-04