Can an “SEO Friendly” url contain a unique ID?

Question

I\'d like to start using \"SEO Friendly Urls\" but the notion of generating and looking up large, unique text \"ids\" seems to be a significant performance challenge relative to

Answer 1

I have two seemingly contradictory points to make here:-

1. Nobody looks at URLs! Experience has "trained" browser users to render the "Address" box contents as invisable, they know the contents will be any two of 'ureadable', 'meaningless' and 'confusing', hence they just ignore it completely.

2. Using a String which can be easily converted to an integer may offer a slight performance advantage over using a longer string which is slightly harder (hash() vs. to_int() ) to convert into an integer. However in the context of the average web application any performance difference would would be negligable.

My advice would be to stick with what your comfortable with.