[solved] I just can't get the index.php out of the URL

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
Why send the URI as a query string

Code:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]

and not a path?

Code:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

I see this all the time and don't understand it. When you do it this way, it means you cannot use clean URIs AND query strings (you only get one query string per URI). If you don't want to get rid of index.php, your URIs look like http://www.example.com/index.php/controller/function/id, so why would you use rewrite rules that generate a request equal to http://www.example.com/index.php?controller/function/id ???