IanTurner - 2:39 pm on Sep 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

There are significant dangers with putting sessionids into parameters and even more with putting userids into parameters.

Firstly just think about the problem of bookmarking - if someone bookmarks a page with sessionid parameters many of these sites will send you a session has expired page when you return. Putting userids in URLs just asks for people to start nosing.

I agree that many sites implement rewriting badly - I've made one or two booboos in my time too, but done well it gives a URL which represents the content of the page, so that people reading the URL know what the page is about, and a page which can be bookmarked or linked to without problems.

[edited by: IanTurner at 2:40 pm (utc) on Sep. 23, 2008]