mkamoski

The question becomes-- Do search engines "like" dynamic URL generation as done by URL rewriting? I don't know if search engines "like" URL rewriting. AFAIK, it has not been shown that search engines "like" dynamic URL generation, as is done by URL rewriting.

The answer is, search engines can't know when a URL is rewritten.  They find the URL on a page someone in the world wide web, it looks just like any URL to a static page, and when the crawler makes a request of the URL from the web server, the server returns an HTML page (or something else like a GIF, JPG, PDF, etc.) back to the crawler. In that context the web server is a black box; the fact the page or the url has been programatically composed is of no concern to any user agent including crawlers.

mkamoski

...I see your point. I agree that the Ordinary Enduser would probably remember Example1 more easily than Example2. However, my point is that a web developer should not hope/ask/require/suggest/plan that the Ordinary Enduser will remember any URL except that of the home page of a given site. Therefore, if the point is that "making a URL easier to remember is a reason that shows it is necessary to do use URL rewriting", I disagree.

Saying "easier to remember" does not really frame the issue as best it could.  Better to say "easier to discover."  For example, at my website I have the following URL where we have a Guide about .NET Obfuscators:
   
   http://www.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/obfuscators/

If someone was on that page and wanted to see if we have a Guide for Build tools, Deployment tools, or Documention tools, they could "hack" my URLs and type the following (we don't yet have these Guides but will soon):

   http://www.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/build/
   http://www.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/deployment/
   http://www.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/documentation/

Further, someone could hack my URLs by removing the subdirectory and find a list of Guides:

   http://www.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/

OTOH, if my URLs looked like the following, there is no way they could "hack" the URLs and get where they want w/o having to click around to find in my menu system:

   http://www.howtoselectguides.com/gobbeldegook.aspx

Your argument that end users shouldn't wouldn't understand URLs anyway doesn't take into consideration that younger people are much more technically saavy than older people, and many web sites built today may still be around years from now. Today's younger people will grow to be an increasingly large percentage of the population, as is always the case when time passes.

Plus we've not even discussed the benefits of eliminating file extensions in URLs for futureproofing.

mkamoski

Finally, I will point out that I have posed some alternative solutions to the URL-Rewriting solutions. These alternatives may or may not be "great"; but, they do exist. However, as the title of this thread suggests, it looks like there may be no real URL-Rewriting "solutions" at present, which, obviously, is yet another good reason not to implement URL-Rewriting.

URL rewriting doesn't work if you have a CMS like DotNetNuke and don't want to "own the code" (i.e. modify the code and then be responsible for remodifying it after each upgrade).

BTW, I've started using ISAPI Rewrite (www.isapirewrite.com) and love it, though it probably does not address all the issues that eron19 was asking to be addressed.