I've always added the file extension to a link "contact.php" is there anything wrong with excluding it and simply having <a href="contact">? seems to work fine, as Im having a lot of trouble with .htaccess removing the file extensions. thx
If this works, then probably thanks to Apache's content negotiation / MultiViews. A proper set of mod_rewrite rules would be more reliable because it doesn't rely on Options +MultiViews being activated on the server, but if it works on the server it will be running on in the long term, it should be fine.
Here is an answer that should point you in the right direction if you still want to use mod_rewrite.