.html?0,,113,,3345 ?? how does that work?!!

this might seem a funny question.... but having only really used PHP, ASP and some CGI, I am confused as to how sites like cnet etc use HTML pages for content..... for example, the hyperlink looks like

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/....html?tag=glnav

how do HTML pages or code use the ?tag=glnav to put content on the pages?

I would have thought that only server side scripts can do this.... maybe I am getting the wrong end of the stick... but I think I need this clearing up for me!!

thanks!!

The glnav value looks like it's a chooser for the nav template, or something along those lines. CNET's content is handled thru the actual filename. It is possible to serve dynamic content with an .htm extension using a few techniques... one is to use a parser to alter the filename being served using an Apache module called mod_rewrite - there's an article on this site about it, here. If you have a close look @ the devarticles site, you'll notice they use it too (the articles appear to sit in their own directories, when in fact they're being served from a file which would look something like: articles.php?articleid=111). Most people use this technique to optimise search engine's picking up their site's pages.

There are other ways to do it using CGI - but i dunno the details...

yeah I have wondered that too, your explanation made no sense to me but I get the jist. It is like PHP Dynamic sites using ?id=pagename.php