Re: Redirection

> news item has its own url (e.g. www.salford.ac.uk/news/details/201/) but what's
> effectively happening is that, internally and totally transparent to the user, the page
> being displayed is actually www.salford.ac.uk/news/news.php?id=201 (which you

Even with the original NCSA server, and presumably with Apache, you could
have http://www.example.com/news.php/201 and the 201 is passed to the
script as an environment variable and can be parsed for use as the selection
parameter.  You should explicitly output a Last-Modified-Date header, and/or
Expires and Cache-Control: max-age headers, as caches cannot infer a 
safe expiry date otherwise.  If you are feeling really good, you should 
also implement If-Modified-Since headers properly (or another correlator).

I am actually rather irritated by these ?id=  pages as it shows that the
software designer completely failed to understand what a URL is.  It is
not technical instructions on how to create the page, but a structured
name for the page.  Even if the HTML is generated from non-HTML source, there
is no reason why the outside world should know that.

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 16:07:45 UTC