I'm a complete web novice but I couldn't help notice that some web sites that generate a lot of content (such as www.stackoverflow.com) often seem to navigate to specific items via the path.
For example clicking on discussion item "blah-blah-blah" in www.whatever.com/discusions will often link to URL with a pattern of www.whatever.com/discussions/123456/blah-blah-blah.
I'm somewhat familiar with the GET/POST, and passing parameters via 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?
You should check out the whole RESTful concept that really took off when Web2.0 became big.