Your thoughts on design to improve readability of address bar subdomains/URL's?

[samzor]

Hi, I'm re-developing an application which stores a number of businesses and provides the user with a search tool where they can find a specific type of business closest to them.

 

The results appears in the address bar with the following format:

 

http://www.nameOfSite.com/query.php?category=10&area=20&expand=10

 

*int is the primary key used to build the results query.

*Category, represents a certain sub-category eg: 10 may = headlights which is a sub category of cars.

*Area may be the name of the town where the user chose to search for the category.

*Expand refers to a specific row in a table which may list a business which satisfies the first two constraints. For instance: you searched and received 10 results and chose no 10 from those results.

 

Therefore i can improve the readability of the search result by using strings eg:

 

http://www.nameOfSite.com/query.php?category=tyres&area=newtown&expand=nameOfCompany

 

However I would rather have a search result build an address bar link like:

 

http://www.nameOfSite.com/tyres/newtown/nameOfCompany

 

What is the name for this process for altering the address bar to improve readability?

 

Where can i read up on how to do this?

Eg: online tutorial/textbook name.

 

*I assume there are tools in frameworks like zend to do this?*

 

thanks in advance

[waynew]

You're talking about mod_rewrite.

 

You basically give instructions to Apache via a .htaccess file on how to interpret a certain link.