Friendly urls... What's your preference?

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
[quote author="tomdelonge" date="1249103315"]except, if the word part of the url is meaningless... the method would only look at the id. you know?[/quote]

Explain in more detail how you envisage this working.

Under what circumstances, for example, would the word part be meaningless? What happens if the word part has meaning that conflicts? Would the word part ever out-rank the ID part? If not, then what point does the word part have? If you say it provides meaning to the person looking at the URL - how do they get that URL if not from a link (replete with plenty of meaning and context) elsewhere on your site? If they get it through a non-your-site source, say email, why is this preferable to someone emailing a URL and saying 'there's this thread about pointless URL components - it's not worth reading but here's the URL anyway'?


Having said that, I find mailing list archive URLs, usually in a format that includes yyyy/mm/dd, are very handy when browsing around the google results page - it lets me triage things very quickly based on vintage of the information, especially if I'm looking for a problem that I know cropped up around a certain date. I have pondered ways of doing this with a forum system, but nothing (that isn't grossly inelegant) sprung to mind.