On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 13:47 -0600, Rusty Keele wrote: > So, > At Sheri's presentation last week she mentioned that Google > doesn't do very well with links that pass more than one variable. For > example: website.com?val1=98&val2=13 I have also found that when I try > to validate any XHTML code where I have links like this I always get an > error. Can somebody explain this to me? Is there some XHTML standard > that prohibits using more than one $_GET variable, or is it just good > coding practice to avoid multi-variable link references?
In my opinion $_GET variables should only be used when the value is truly variable. Examples of it's use could be search queries. I am a big fan of what are called "clean URLs", or URLs without the ?=& gobbledygook. What looks better to you? http://www.example.com/index.php?action=viewPage&page=productPage or http://example.com/products Why not please both Google *and* people by switching to clean URLs. The best way to implement clean URLs would require some Apache and/or .htaccess hackery with either mod_rewrite, ErrorDocument, or ForceType stuff. There are lots of examples in the world of all of that. However, if none of those will work for your situation (perhaps a less than cooperative host). You can just use the pretty parameters after the page name itself. http://example.com/site.php/products This will work on almost all web hosts. In this example your site.php page will not read the vars via $_GET but via $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']. It's not quite as pretty as if you used some .htaccess trickery, but still a big step in the direction towards Google and People friendliness. --lonnie _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
