Editing Rewrite engine (section)

==Benefits and drawbacks==
{{Section OR|date=April 2013}}
There are several benefits to using URL rewriting:<ref name="sidenote">Many of these only apply to HTTP servers whose default behavior is to map URLs to [[filesystem]] entities (i.e. files and directories); certain environments, such as many HTTP [[application server]] platforms, make this irrelevant.</ref>
* The links are "cleaner" and more descriptive, improving their "friendliness" to both [[usability|users]] and [[search engine optimization|search engines]].
* They prevent undesired "[[inline linking]]", which can waste [[bandwidth (computing)|bandwidth]].
* The site can continue to use the same URLs even if the underlying technology used to serve them is changed (for example, switching to a new [[blog software|blogging engine]]).

There can, however be drawbacks as well; if a user wants to modify a URL to retrieve new data, '''URL rewriting''' may hinder the construction of custom queries due to the lack of named variables. For example, it may be difficult to determine the date from the following format:
 <nowiki>http://www.example.com/Blog/06/04/02/</nowiki>
In this case, the original query string was more useful, since the query variables indicated month and day:
 <nowiki>http://www.example.com/Blog/Posts.php?Year=06&Month=04&Day=02</nowiki>