query strings being replaced with long paths

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query strings being replaced with long paths
by Herman Robak on Thursday 24/Nov/2005, @00:04

Keep in mind that some CMSses "cheats" with their URLs to make them look like static content URLs:

From
http://www.some-cms.tld/cms-app.cgi?topic=foo&article=bar

To
http://www.some-cms.tld/cms-app/foo/bar

The latter is shorter and cleaner. And if the CMS is clever enough, it can provide all the proper directives (ETag, Last-Modified, Content-Length...) of a proper static document (brace yourselves for some weird bugs...)

This can be used to make the URLs more opaque, too. Instead of a lot of semi-readable parameters, you get one or two really long numbers, or random strings. You don't know how much of the URL is the path to the web application and where the input parameters to the web app start. Systematic digging for articles or vunlerabilities becomes harder that way.

Hence, the path and the query string are not separate entities.

Related Links

·   Articles on Konqueror
·   Also by Herman Robak
·   Contact author

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