About the index.html File

You are going to create a lot of files labeled index.html. When a URL is passed to a browser that does not specify a file, the browser automatically requests index.html from the host server. Essentially, this means something like http://baseurl.com and http://baseurl.com/index.html are the same. (This is not true for all websites, but for many.)

File vs Directory based URLs

This assumption allows for the publication of “clean URL’s”, as we do not need to explicitly include the index.html at the end of the URL. This is not to say that we could not have additional pages that we explicitly address. For example we could have additional html pages at the same directory level, such as an about.html. In which case the URL would look like baseurl.com/about.html. Our directory would look like the following in this case.

However, if you wished to have a “cleaner” looking URL, you could create an additional child directory labeled /about and place an index.html within that directory. The URL for this case would look like baseurl.com/about/. Notice how we do not use the .html and instead the URL ends with a directory slash. Our directory would look like the following in this case.

Why is this important?

This discussion was had so that you could understand why I had you label your file as index.html. Eventually, this means your file will live at a URL that looks something like baseurl.github.io/341-work/week-03-hw/.

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Please read the following from the Mozilla Developer Network on Dealing with Files to understand more about this topic.