MOD RE-WRITES.

People use website URLs in all kinds of ways.

We send them to other people by email, put them on online discussion boards, or even write them on scraps of paper. This often applies not just to website home pages, but to specific content within a website.

Typically website developers want to encourage this, as it means increased traffic to their sites. As such, a well designed website should allow users to enter at any URL (not just the homepage), and the URLs throughout the site should be easy to use.

A URL is easier to use if it is short but descriptive. The URL should have some text describing the content (not just numbers), but should not be too long.

Search engines find it easier to index pages which follow these rules. Content which is easier to index is more likely to be included in search results.

Website URLs are often quite long and quite meaningless to humans. This is because many websites have dynamic content, meaning that HTML returned to the browser is generated on-the-fly, rather than simply being stored as a static HTML file.

The URL is used not only to reference an HTML document at a fixed address, but to pass pieces of data to software running on the webserver, which then generates the HTML page dynamically.

Typically this software is of the form of scripts written in a web scripting language such as Perl, PHP, or ASP.

Using an URL rewrite engine, the website software can be presented with URLs in one form, while actual requests (and URLs seen by the user) are in another form. So rewrite engines allow URLs to be tidied up and made more user friendly, by configuring rewrite rules, rather than modifying the webserver software.

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