URL GET request formatted as a deep link

Question

I'm wondering how data passed to the URL can be "camouflaged" as a deep link. Here is an example of a site that does this: http://www.conradit.no/

I actually developed that site, but paths have been changed later.

So I have seen sites that does this even without referencing the index page (e.g. www.sometime.com/get/data/camouflaged)

I have seen some jQuery libraries that does this using anchor tags, but that is out of the question since users of the CMS I'm writing may want to use anchor tags on their pages.

I would like to know how this is done all server side using php and .htaccess files or such.

Thanks for all replies!

Answer 1

They use a rewrite engine, such as Apache's mod_rewrite.

Answer 2

The site is using some URL rewriting techniques. By the look of the URL path and the Server header field in the response I guess they’re using the so called path info (see Apache’s AcceptPathInfo) to have requests like /index.php/foo/bar redirected internally to /index.php with the path info /foo/bar.

But they could also use other techniques that can rewrite/redirect the requested URL based on patterns like Apache’s mod_rewrite.