webpage re-direct/page suffix

[jellied]

i run a website that uses Wordpress, alas I did not use permalinks which means when i've designed a dedicated page for something i can't hand out a link like www.xxxx.com/special.html

to get round this i use re-directs so it goes from special.html and is mapped to www.xxxx.com/?pageid-nnn

My question is, how do i avoid having to quote the .html part of the url to someone? i got this working yesterday on IE 8 but not firefox