About Files: This page has information that may be helpful as you deal with files. They do not cover everything. The intent is to address some frequently asked questions about files .

How do you name your files?

Most Important: Name your files so you will know what they are. You may consider two oppositional preferences.

Spaces in file names are not good. Use "filenames.htm" or "file_names.htm" instead of the two words separated by a space in "File Names". If you must have words separated, use the underscore to separate, as in "file_names.htm".

Upper case letters in file names are not necessary.

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File Extensions:

In Windows, the file names are in two parts....the part before the dot, and the part after the dot. The part before the dot is the file name, and the part after the dot, called the extension, is supposed to identify the kind of file. Your computer operating system (i.e. Windows) also uses the extension to choose what program it will use to open a file. Common extensions in files associated with web pages are "htm", "html", "jpg", and "gif".

The "jpg" and the "gif" extensions indicate that the file is an image. The "jpg" image is usually a photograph, and the "gif" image is usually a drawing, like a cartoon. These image files are preferred for web pages because they are smaller than other types of image files, and thus take less time to load into a browser.

The htm and html extensions are used for web page files. Composer for Windows automatically inserts an html extension for each web page file.

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"index.html" or "default.html"

If a browser is given a web address (url) that leads to a folder, browsers look for and display any file named either "index.html" or "default.html".

If there is no file with one of those names, the browser will display a list of the files in the folder, on a page that it creates and calls Index of /"name of folder". You get to choose which one you want to see first.

We give our introductory or welcome page either of these names to tell browsers to start with the file we want readers to see first.

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What are "relative links"?

These are links to files and images in the same folder as the html file you are working with. . When we make links for these files, we just use the file name for the link...no drive, folder, etc. When we want to create a link to a file that is in the same folder as the page file we are working on, we use relative links.

For a image, like this one,

the "relative link" is simply the file name, which is "eiffeltower_waving_md_wht.gif". This image file is in the same folder as this page file, and the browser expects that both the page file and the image file are in the same folder.

What does this mean? Your links to files and images that are part of your project, and are in the same folder as the page on which you are making links, are entered as relative links. All you need to do for these is to type in the file name for the link. You do not type the full address of the file you want to link to, such as.c:\filemgt\eiffeltower_waving_md_wht.gif on their computers.

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What are "absolute links"?

An absolute link may be a url, such as http://my.yahoo.com/. This is a link is the address of a file on an Internet server. A browser can find this file because it looks up the address of the Yahoo server, and then it goes to that server, looks in the specified folder, and displays the index file for the folder.

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