Justin, Many thanks for the reply. I didn't provide enough detail in some spots, and I'll attempt to clarify.
> Seems to me like this would generate a lot of extra server traffic, and a > little confusion... The only benefit I can see is that you're getting rid of > ugly page URLs. User experience is very important to me. I'm creating a tool for other people, and as far as I'm concerned my users "own" the URL that the user sees and bookmarks. > So, your URLs will actually look like > http://www.site.com/article.php?PHPSESSID=12413523245546453 No problem, since the user will never see this and other session properties using this Invisible Get method even with cookies disabled. (Even it it turns out that I still need to pass the session ID to the "user URL" for people with locked cookie jars, that's okay.) > Nothing I can see in your code/idea changes the fact that EACH INSTANCE OF A > SCRIPT NEEDS TO MAINTAIN STATE (carry the session around). That's fine. You and Ernest convinced me that it was silly to try and reinvest the wheel. Now I'm only concerned with the wheel experience. > 2. bookmarking/linking/etc... essentially what you're saying is that one > URL, page.php, will do many different things (like present many different > articles), based on session information... this doesn't sound to good to me... Yuck, yeah...what I have in mind is not that evil. :^P The page will be basically the same, but the objects on it need to retain their state during a session. For example, let's say I have 50 "spinner" objects on a page. All spinners have a value that must be persistent, plus buttons/links that increment and decrement. Those buttons/links call "submit.php" to pass changes to persistent variables back to itself. > You *may* want to consider the apache mod_rewrite stuff. The article was very interesting and I may use it for some other stuff, but I need to call submit.php to put the objects properties into my session globals. > Just one last note... PHP sessions, by default, store the session variables > in files transparently (ie, you don't have to do much), NOT a database. So, > writing a script that requires sessions will NOT require MySQL. Thanks for the clarification. Yesterday was my first experience with PHP sessions, and I didn't quite get it. > Just look at amazon, yahoo, msn, or any other big site... they just pass the > sid around in URLs, and people deal with it. Learn from the "best". The best is not good enough! :O) They shouldn't keep transient session information in the URL. If the only drawback to Invisible Get is the (unnoticeable) serving of the tiny interim page, I think this could be a really good solution. -- Charles Wiltgen -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
