[=Adam=]

Hi all,

Just thought I'd join up and get picking youir brains straight away!

I was just wondering how you guys approach this, when you link pages within your web sites, how do you do it? My past practice has been to link everything together by page file name such as:

website.com/news.htm

website.com/services.htm

But I've noticed that a lot of sites will just link to a directory, like this:

website.com/news

website.com/services

So would that mean that they are setting up a seperate folder for each section with an index page in each one? It seems a much tidier way of doing it, but I'm just wondering if there would be any impact by choosing this method.

I hope this makes sense...

Adam ~

[Bill Posters]

They could be creating directories for each section, with an index/default file which is automatically and invisibly used by the server.

- or -

They could be using mod_rewrite or a similar, server-side mechanism which takes the 'directory' and automatically and invisibly sends a rewritten version of the url to the server.

e.g.

website.com/news -> website.com/index.php?section=news

[haku]

And for a third option, they could be using the .htaccess file, and writing a command in it so that a file other than one named index is showed when no filename is added after the directory.

[wheedwacker]

For most for most sites it is mod_rewrite, occasionally what haku said.

[=Adam=]

Thanks for the answers. Is there a windows based solution that achieves the same results as mod_rewrite?

[pgo]

Uh...you can use Apache on Windows...

If you mean an IIS solution, yes, there is, but I'd rather shove hot pokers in my eye than use IIS again.

[7am]

Content Management Systems like ExpressionEngine can automatically make clean urls for you and still let you use straight html.

But I have to ask why you are using IIS? Have you checked out WAMP?

-Lee

[haku]

Interestingly enough, that last post by 7am was posted at 6:59am (my time).