But "/now.html" feels "cleaner" to me. I know others might disagree.
If this now thing could support just "/now.html" or even "/now" redirecting to "/now.html", that would be swell! Maybe they already do support it? Hoping to learn from the community if these alternative paths are supported.
File path /now/index.html is a fine way to expose your content at /now ... Most webservers will default to config that allows this.
You could replace it in the future with a gigantic web app that is wired into your brain implant to retrieve realtime status. If you use /now.html, you would have to fight the framework to lie about the implementation details, instead of just not specifying them in the first place.
You could also configure your webserver to serve /home/carbonatom/webstuff/dereks-idea/now/new-version-2025.html as /now, if you like. These are the kind of implementation details that a good URL will hide (even if the specific example is a terrible case, the equivalent does happen sometimes!).
there's no reason your HTML files have to be named with .html at the end of the filename
How do you know that? Do you know how I use my computer? I need to browse the HTML files lying on my disk with my browser? My OS and browser does not open files that are not named .html on the disk as HTML pages on the browser. So I need them to be .html so that I can browse my pages on my laptop.
I don't have any fancy tools or frameworks to create extension-less URLs. I just dump my HTMLs into a folder. So can /now.html work for this?
Edit: Wow! Why downvote me for an honest question? What's so revolting about this question that you feel the need to downvote this?