Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Ben Bacarisse]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:19 PM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 11:55 AM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>>>> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> it binds your URLs to
>>>>> the concrete file system. That may not seem like too much of a
>>>>> problem, but it's a pretty big limitation; you can't have URLs like
>>>>> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo" without some help from the web
>>>>> server, eg Apache's mod_rewrite.
>>>>
>>>> I don't follow this.  Your "can't" and "big limitation" suggests
>>>> something inevitable, but I don't see it as an intrinsic problem with
>>>> the language.  I'm sure PHP is not as flexible as the frameworks you
>>>> mention, but you are not tied to URLs mapping to files.  Maybe you meant
>>>> that this is what often happens, or what most people do, with PHP.
>>>
>>> How would you, with PHP itself, handle database-provided URLs? The
>>> only way I've ever seen it done is at an external level - such as
>>> mod_rewrite - which means that someone else, *not* the PHP script, is
>>> managing your URLs. They're pushed to some external config file
>>> somewhere. That's okay for just one URL pattern, but it doesn't scale
>>> well, which is why (for example) Wikipedia's editing pages are
>>> "/w/index.php?...." instead of, say, "/wiki/Foo/edit" or
>>> "/wiki/edit/Foo".
>>>
>>> Unless you know something I don't?
>>
>> Provided some early part of the URL is handled by PHP, the rest of the
>> URL path is provided to PHP in $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"].
>
> Is it possible to do that without having ".php" visible in the path?

Yes, though because that will depend on how the server is configured I
should perhaps say "usually yes"!

-- 
Ben.