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

Another point: people sometimes manually edit URLs, in order to go up the directory tree. So they might try to load a page like http://site.com/a/b, get a "Not found" error, and then try http://site.com/a or http://site.com. Of course, if your URLs aren't based on an actual directory tree, this may not work. But you can still try to support it.

Some browsers even encourage this, like IE with its error messages, and Safari with a menu that appears when you right-click the page title.