This may be a dumb question, but I have my reasons

My problem is unexplainable. I'll try my best though, in layman's terms.

So you know when you go to a website, like google.com, and you see their index page? That's the server, showing the index page, because no file was specified. Well, what I want my .htaccess to do is literally redirect the user to a specified file name if none is specified. So if a user accesses http://www.mysite.com/, I want them to be redirected to http://www.mysite.com/index.html.

It's dumb, I know, but my self-written scripts are glitchy that don't like to work well with my website.

TL;DR How do I redirect the top-level address to a specific filename?

Thanks!

-PG

You do NOT!!

You ESPECIALLY do NOT if the filename is also an "index" filename.

Servers already do a "silent" redirect (302 response) if the URI terminates in a trailing slash '/' then search the specified folder for a file in the list of index files specified in httpd.config or .htaccess in the case of Apache or the default document list for IIS, they also do a "silent" redirect to the trailing slash URI version if the requested URI terminates without a file extension and a trailing slash is not present.

So when trying to redirect to a named document that is also in the index file list there's every chance you are going to create a locked loop.

You can redirect FROM an index file to the root of a folder by using THE_REQUEST directive

Also it would be impossible to write a rediect that attempted to match on "index.html" NOT being in the HTTP request as that would try to redirect EVERY request for any filename to the root.
Just in case you didn't know when apache encounters a URL that matches a redirect/rewrite condition it does a second HTTP request which reloads and examines .htaccess again.

I ended up doing something like if(dirname($_SERVER['REQEST_URI'])=='/'){header("Location index.html");}, but I'll just rewrite the JS if it's that big of an issue.