URL Manipulation... '/' instead of '?'

i realize my subject is horrible... but i really don't know how to explain this...

I swear i read in an article once that you could pass variables using / instead of ?...

for example:
http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/447
(referring to the addres, not the article)

basically...
http://localhost/index.php?var=what
-INTO-
http://localhost/var/what
(or however it works)

am i making sense? or am i far off my rocker?
[maybe i have the whole thing mis-understood]

Link: thispage.php?a=do_it

Passing without the ? mark

Link: thispage.php/a=do_it

You can pick up the query in the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] var.

-------------------------------------

Its a waste of time. It used to be descent to do before the search engines got smart, and they are really smart now (well, most of them).

The thing is that most search engines will avoid indexing pages with '?' query in it. So, a few smart people got together and said lets get rid of it and use the '/' forward slash instead so the search engines will index these pages. Well, the search engines got smarter and contrairy to popular belief, it does'nt work.

if extension
( .php .asp .html .cgi .pl .cfm .htm ect etc etc )
--
and
/
after extension
--
and
=
occurs one or more times
--
and
&
occurs one or more times
--
or
?
after extension
--

Don't index page

As you can see from the jibber jabber above, it won't work for search engine rankings on the big SE's. They are smart, really smart. Use mod_rewrite if you are looking for good rankings.

The above url is either a hard coded directory or mod_rewrite (or the alike) parsing the structure of the soft directory as a query string - or could even be a server directive that throws the url to a script for processing...

that makes so much sense!

thanks for doing such a great job at explaining it...

Mad Cow, we actually have a really good article on apache and php, which shows you to how to produce nice urls, using apaches forcetype function.

URL

Just to give you an example, using htaccess files you tell it to parse the file art as a php file. Then you use some special code that gets the extra values on the end. So in the case of devarticles articles, there is a file on our server called art (without an extension) which is called when you call

URL

hope this helps a bit

Thats what I meant by the alike....

Didn't know you guys had an article on it, good to know...

Ben Rowe:
that must be the article i read before!!! That must be where I got the idea from...

thanks!