I'm a clean URL fanatic, some would say to the point of extremity. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, apart from images and other unusual media, that sites should not contain filename extensions at all.

The reason I despise extensions is that one day you have a simple HTML page called "something.html", which you later upgrade to, say, "something.phtml" when someone decides to use PHP on it. Now every single link to that page is broken, and has to be repaired or redirected. Later, perhaps, the page is modified again, this time into a CGI called "something.cgi" which breaks your links all over again.

If you use Apache's MultiViews, it will figure out what you mean without benefit of the extension. If you think this is too slow, use Squid as a turbocharger, but for low-mid volume sites it seems to work fine without any sort of accelerant.

I would even go so far as to specify a URL such as:     http://my.domain.com/script/1234 Which is about as basic as you can get. The '1234' will be passed via CGI to your application which can process it as you will. Further, you can make up your own format for the URL data, without worrying about '&' or '?'. As long as you use taint, and check carefully (as you should anyways), then you may find this a lot simpler, especially when many parameters make for an unwieldly URL.