Are the .html extensions really necessary in URLs?

[ilg-ul]

Search terms

URL, html

Question

I was wondering whether the use of explicit .html file extensions in the URLs generated by TypeDoc is of any special value, compared to the shorter folder type URLs.

For example the Logger class in one of my projects has the following URL:

https://xpack.github.io/logger-ts/classes/Logger.html

Personally I expected something like:

https://xpack.github.io/logger-ts/classes/Logger/

In my opinion, the second URL is generally preferred, as being easier to use as a link and (subjectively) looking nicer.

Is there any reason (that I'm missing) for using the .html URLs?

[RunDevelopment]

@Gerrit0 mentioned before that they still want typedoc to support not using a web server.

Right now, you just open any typedoc-generated HTML file locally (e.g. file:///path/to/repo/docs/index.html) and all links in it will work. But this will not work with /Logger/-type links, because the browser will just show this:

[Gerrit0]

Yep, exactly, eventually I want to do #2111, which will enable this, among other things, but haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

[ilg-ul]

Yeah, opening the site locally might be useful while initially working on the configuration, but all my other web projects come with a way to start a simple local browser, on a localhost port, and I never felt the need to open the site directly from the file system. I guess that it wouldn't be very difficult to add this functionality to typedoc too; or add a separate command for this.

It would be useful that a future version to generate sites without the .html extensions.

[Gerrit0]

Even if nobody else uses it, it's extremely useful to me, I'll frequently have several different projects/versions built locally when testing, it's nice to be able to just open up a built file rather than starting a temporary web server to check something for five minutes

[ilg-ul]

Did you add support for short URLs? Since I can't find details on how to configure it.

[Gerrit0]

No, it's being tracked as a part of #2111

[ilg-ul]

Ok, I subscribed to #2111 to get updates when you address this issue.

[easyontop]

after typedoc use express to host it for * links and if it not found you can add a custom 404 page ig