This new post from the Mind Tree blog (at hurricanesoftware.com) asks the question "why do you care about friendly URLs in PHP applications?"

Nice URLs, readable URLs, search-engine-friendly URLs. Different names same deal. [...] Turns out this isn't all that hard with PHP - in fact it can turn into something that's very useful from more than just a readability viewpoint.

He shows how to use mod_rewrite and an .htaccess file to automatically grab the request and map it to the right place. Then, the PHP script looks at the incoming data and pushes the correct page back out to the browser. He's also included some modifications to the original idea that allow for numeric grouping and named groups for rewriting content.

On Codewalkers.com today, there's a note about an interesting bit of discussion going on over on the PHP mailing lists dealing with "named arguments".

There is an interesting discussion going on in the internals list on whether or not to have named arguements in php6. The start of the discussion is here with a break off thread here.

Named arguments would allow you do to something like this:

testFunc(name:"test",vals:"stuff")

Naming the items in the code and allowing them to be accessed via one variable internal to the function. There are some pretty good arguments on both sides of things, but it still doesn't seem like it's going to be taken much further than this...