Neat tip for clean URLs
6th August 2003
Here’s one of the neatest tips for clean URLs I’ve seen yet, from Thijs van der Vossen. He’s come up with a mod_rewrite rule that checks to see if the requested file exists if you add .html on to the end of it, and serves it up if that’s the case. I’m posting the full code snippet here because it’s just too good to risk losing to link-rot in the distant future:
RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteRule (.*) $1\.html [L]
More recent articles
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025
- The ChatGPT sharing dialog demonstrates how difficult it is to design privacy preferences - 3rd August 2025