index.php .htaccess trick won't work

[eluser]Aken[/eluser]
[quote author="wiredesignz" date="1328777427"]@Aken, A decent developer is actually supposed to be in control of the application, which means specifying and understanding the application requirements and other things that influence server load and response times.

Your "small overhead" for redundant calls to the application for missing files does not scale in the real world.

If you need to use a specific "keyword" in the URL then you should adjust your RewriteRule accordingly.[/quote]
A decent developer will prevent all of those insignificant file calls from creating 404 errors, and thus preventing the redundant calls in the first place.

Likewise, a good developer will prevent the autoloading of resources on said error calls, thus reducing the amount of overhead to the handful of PHP code that handles a request. Sure, this might not be the best scalable option, but 99.9% of projects the users here deal with will not get anywhere near the amount of traffic required for that to become an issue. And since most people use CodeIgniter for its ease and fast application deployment, I don't see why giving them more work in the interest of nearly infinitesimal performance benefits is worth it.

I think it's also worthy to note that, as exampled by chemiks here, most people have no idea how .htaccess works. So giving them the ability to add it once and never have to edit it again is very useful to them and others giving support.