First let me ask about MVC architecture- ASP.NET MVC and Ruby on Rails. They both don’t use page file extensions. Does this have to do with something native to the MVC architecture or is this functionality set up somewhere else?
In the case that it isn’t native to the way MVC works, why aren’t other technologies not set up by default to not need file extensions? ASP.NET for example can be set up to not need the file extension, but isn’t that way by default.
As far as I know, having page file extensions on the web is useless, it seems like that may be catching on, but why has it taken this long?
For the Microsoft Platform, I would think it was because ever since complex operating systems existed, there have always been extensions. The HTTP protocol was only used for serving static content at first, ISAPI and CGI came later. Since content was already on the disk with a file extension, you needed to specify the file extension to the file you wanted to be served (because that was part of the full name of the file). It was like a file system over HTTP.
Later, when CGI / ISAPI came along, the extensions weren’t really required, but the pattern was set, and it was followed. Microsoft’s platform was built on the extension. IIS used it for knowing which ISAPI extensions to pass the request through (.aspx goes through the aspnet_isapi).
I can’t speak for other platforms like UNIX.