Elliote Rusty Harold on the lousy support for URL abstraction on the server side:
It’s best to design your URLs without respect to how they will actually be implemented. Design them so they make sense to human clients and search engines. Then worry later about how you’ll actually implement the backend that serves representations of those URLs.
Sadly server support for such schemes is very lacking in 2006. Doing it on top of Apache requires serious mod_rewrite voodoo. (That’s how WordPress creates the very nice URLs you see on this site.) PHP doesn’t help out here since it’s still very tied to a one-URL, one .phtml file model.
Apache Cocoon and Popoon’s sitemap model does a lot of what ERH’s looking for. But those are front controller patterns that push the complexity of routing from the server and into your application. [ via Todd ]
