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URLs of the Real World

Before proceeding to write code, this section looks at three examples of URLs that you’ll see frequently

while browsing, and discusses the technical details involved in creating these URLs. This will help you

understand where we’re heading, and why you’ll write the code from the exercises in this chapter. You

will see examples with:

?

Dynamic URLs

?

Numeric rewritten URLs

?

Keyword-rich URLs

Example #1: Dynamic URLs

Data displayed by dynamic web sites is usually stored in some sort of backend database. Typically, a

numeric ID is associated with each data row of a database table, and all database operations with the

table (such as selecting, inserting, deleting, or updating rows) are done by referencing that ID.

More often than not, the same ID used to identify an item in the database is also used in PHP scripts

to refer to that particular item — such as a product in an e-commerce web site, an article of a blog, and

so on. In a dynamic URL, these IDs are passed via the query string to a script that presents differing

content accordingly.

Figure 3-2 shows a page from

http://www.cristiandarie.ro/BalloonShop/

. This is a demo

e-commerce site presented in one of Cristian’s books, and employs dynamic URLs. As you can see,

the page is composed using data from the database, and the ID that identifies the data item is taken

from the dynamic URL.

Figure 3-2

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Chapter 3: Provocative SE-Friendly URLs

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