What makes a “friendly URL”?

Question

I\'ve read a great deal of discussion recently (both on this site and elsewhere) about \"friendly URLs\" but I\'m not sure what exactly makes a URL \"friendly\" and why we r

Answer 1

I happen to agree with you, but shhh don't tell anyone.

It's just my humble opinion, but it seems silly to me that

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/522466/

and

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/522466/what-makes-a-friendly-url

are the same page. I mean, I can see that the hyphenated question title gives the URL some context, but it unless you know that part's optional the URL just gets longer unnecessarily.