This is something I have always wondered and yet I never thought to look up. To quote Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet:
O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
Thankfully it means very little, well apart from the obvious lack of an “l”, and I can finally stop my occasional wonderings!
Technically speaking they are both sent with a MIME type of “text/html” which tells the user’s browser to expect a page containing html mark-up. It then renders the page accordingly. Seemingly the “.htm” file type is a throwback to the early days of DOS and the Windows 3.x operating systems where the length of the file type was limited to just three letters.
So, which one to use? The choice is yours!
