NYCPHP Meetup

[Cliff Hirsch]

On 12/13/07 2:34 AM, "John Campbell" <jcampbell1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  It seems to me that a more robust method would be to have something like
>> /param1/value1/param2/value2/.../paramn/valuen
> 
> Doesn't that defeat the purpose of pretty urls?  I though the whole
> point was so the url looks like:
> 
> /blog/MostRecent/Page1/ and /blog/john_caught_picking_his_nose/
> 
> instead of:
> /blog/orderby/recent/page/1/ and /blog/post_id/37/ or
> 
> If you are going to do it the latter way, I don't understand the
> benefit vs a query string.  Maybe I am missing something.

You bring up a good point. Perhaps the place to begin is the beginning,
which is, "what is the point and benefit." Things I have heard:

1. SEO friendly because search engines do not process the query string
    Ok, but say you need to be logged in. What's the point?

2. Easier for humans to understand
   Perhaps for content/blog/news site; maybe for recognizing what a bookmark
is. But how many of us do that? Depends on the application....

3. Security. Hides the file.php and param names.
   Yeah, but I hope you are not solely relying on security by obscurity

4. Looks cool and Rails does it
   Do we have to mimic everything Rails does?!

5. Other?