url rewriting - websites urls without file extension?

Question

When I look at Amazon.com and I see their URL for pages, it does not have .htm, .html or .php at the end of the URL.

It is like:
http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=topnav_storetab_b?ie=UTF8&node=283155

Why and how? What kind of extension is that?

Answer 1

Your browser doesn't care about the extension of the file, only the content type that the server reports. (Well, unless you use IE because at Microsoft they think they know more about what you're serving up than you do). If your server reports that the content being served up is Content-Type: text/html, then your browser is supposed to treat it like it's HTML no matter what the file name is.