Arjan Tijms' Weblog

For some time now there's a trend going on to simplify URLs used on the web. Increasingly the trend is to remove technical clutter from URLs and make them cleaner and friendlier for humans to remember. E.g. from something like http://www4.campaign.myorgananization.com/dlt/cmp/~foobar/camp-2013/E3483A78H.jspx we went to: myorgananization.com/sale2013 The protocol, "http://", is mostly skipped when printing URLs for humans to type over nowadays since browsers simply default to it. The elaborate subdomains, specifically the "www1", "www2", "wwwN" nonsense, is mostly handled internally by load balancers these days, etc. E.g. I photographed the following from an ad that was displayed on Rembrandtplein, Amsterdam: The extension One specific technical part of the URL that can also be shaved off is the extension (".jspx" in the example above), and this will be the topic of this article. Technically, an extension can have