Canonical links & CodeIgniter

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
if you are worried about people not using the link you want the search engines to catch why not use redirects?

I know google likes urls with .html at the end more than others but IMO it's a trick that will go stale and it's annoying for the visitors, .html means nothing to them.
I think the only time an extension suffix has a function is when you can get the content in different formats like http://example.com/news.html - http://example.com/news.rss - http://example.com/news.json and http://example.com/news/Article-name.html - http://example.com/news/Article-name.pdf - http://example.com/news/Article-name.txt .

Adding the date to the article should only happen when two or more articles share the same name and if it was up to me i would add it to the article slug to have a unique identifier. http://example.com/news/Article-name and http://example.com/news/Article-name-01-01-2009.