.htaccess question

I host a number of domains at a "well known hosting company" on
various shared hosting plans. Most of these domains are simple
static pages. Some have some dynamic content, some forms, some PHP
to process the forms.

What I want to do is to have PHP statements embedded in ordinary
..html file and have those PHP statements interpreted. Their httpd
server (apache) is configured to interpret PHP in .phtml files as
well as the obvious .php, .php4 and some others. I believe I
should be able to convince apache to interpret .html files with
PHP via some statement(s) in the .htaccess file.

My intent is to hide from visitors to the site anything suggesting
dynamic content. That is: every page seen via the location bar on
their browser should be of type .html. ... Am I being unreasonable
with this goal?

The hosting company have been either unwilling or unable to answer
a question for me. They tell me "... do this, that, or the other
thing" in .htaccess to get the results I want. Alternatively, they
tell me to use some other technique that I explicitly said I
didn't wanna do (put it in .phtml files). Their suggestions for
..htaccess simply do not work.

They have told me to add an "AddType ..." statement to the
..htaccess. It does not work. We've been going round & round for
about a week now via email (no telephone support) with no resolution.

Something tells me they don't want me doing this, or that the tech
support folks don't know how to do it. Any help in this forum
would be appreciated.

"Rex"

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And lo, Rex Karz didst speak in alt.www.webmaster:

 > I believe I should be able to convince apache to interpret .html files
 > with PHP via some statement(s) in the .htaccess file.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

 > They have told me to add an "AddType ..." statement to the .htaccess. It
 > does not work. We've been going round & round for about a week now via
 > email (no telephone support) with no resolution.

Take an empty .htaccess file and add the following single line to it:

RedirectMatch 410 ^.*

.... and put it in your root directory. Then visit your website. If you
don't get a 410 Gone response code, your server is ignoring your .htaccess
file. Your host needs to do something about this.

If you *do* get a 410 Gone response, there is something wrong with the
syntax of whatever AddType directive you added. *You* need to do
something about this.

Grey

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