Question

I’m a complete web novice but I couldn’t help notice that some web sites that generate a lot of content (such as http://www.stackoverflow.com) often seem to navigate to specific items via the path.
For example clicking on discussion item “blah-blah-blah” in http://www.whatever.com/discusions will often link to URL with a pattern of http://www.whatever.com/discussions/123456/blah-blah-blah.
I’m somewhat familiar with the GET/POST, and passing parameters via http://www.whatever.com?discussion=blah-blah-blah, but a search via google on this method has not been very fruitful. I’m assuming the number in the path is a database ID, but after that I’m just guessing. I’m wondering if a separate web page is created for each item, but that seems redundant, but then again maybe it’s an SEO technique.
Anyone dare to elaborate?

Answer 1

You should check out the whole RESTful concept that really took off when Web2.0 became big.