Rewriting Urls for dynamic content

Hi, i'm in the process of re writing some of my dynamic content urls.
My question is. What is the best way to approach this.

currently i'm looking at something like this.

www.mysite.com/catname-typename

as a rewrite for www.mysite.com/cat=catname&type=typename

now. Would i be better off actually re-writing it to represent an actualy html page like so.

www.mysite.com/catname-typename.html

Or do you think that it would make no difference?

It would not make that much of a differene, the only thing i'm worried about there is how long are your cat names and your type names? you dont want that url to be way way to long.

If you have a category with a '-' in it then your structure may not get parsed correctly.

I prefer using '/':

www.mysite.com/cat/catname/type/typename

And then if you had a different display page that would normally get called as www.mysite.com/display=catname&start=1&end=11 it would be converted to:

www.mysite.com/display/catname/start/1/end/11

Basically your 404 is going to have to parse out no matter how you do it and you just want to make sure the character you are using as the delimeter is going to always be valid. That is why I prefer the '/' over the '-'.

If you have a limited number of templates you use to display your dynamic content, then you could do a quick switch statement on the first parameter and then hardcode the parsing of the remaining params.

In other words, if you have a limited number of dynamic template pages then you may be better off with something like:

www.mysite.com/cat/catname/typename
www.mysite.com/display/catname/1/11

Which is nice cause the URLs are shorter but you are hard-coded expected paramaters so not quite as portable.

EDIT: Damn, I sure wish I owned the domain mysite.com ! ;)

Ohhh yeah and also be very carefull with how you end your url, if you end it with a "/" so something like www.domainname.com/somethin/something/

make sure you make your url support it without the "/" in the end becuase when Yahoo displays your cashed pages it always takes the "/" out and if you dont handle it then your in trouble

I like cat/catname/type/typename
and catname-typename.html
and I think both are fine

Thanks for the heads up. Now how would this affect pr for that particular page. Would it be treated as 1 page ie. default.aspx,
or would it actually believe that there are multiple pages. So each of my catnames would have thier own page rank?