DB driven pages

the best way to do it?

[ThePrince]

hi all,

I am wondering about this:

I understand how you can drive your whole website out of a DB using ids to get the content displayed on the pages. (page.asp?id=1234) the proble with these is that SE do not get to give you points for keywords within the name of the page. (free-ipods.asp)

I was checking out the cnn.com site and wondered how they do it. All their pages a unique address, and all end with index.html.

[cnn.com...]

same on yahoo:

[news.yahoo.com...]

They must be using a DB, no?

how do they do it? Are they really creating directories for each and everyone of their news?

Of course, these guys really don't need to get points on google, but I'm just wondering...

thanks!

[bill]

It depends upon your server as to how this would be done. Look around for information on "cruft free" URLs and you can find some examples of how people do this with different systems.

[fischermx]

CNN's urls and Yahoo's are quite different, but I get the idea. Yahoo's are using parameters. CNN looks like static html pages.
I'd bet the CNN approach is cleaner and better, since they appear like being totally static.
Of course they are not, they have a DB behind.
To do this, you need to learn a concept that I know of "http module" or "http rewrite", that allows you to convert those seemingly "static" htmls to the proper parameters to call the database and populate your page, then return the result in a file with an HTML extension.