URIs identify and URLs locate; however, locators are also identifiers, so every URL is also a URI, but there are URIs which are not URLs.
Examples
This is my name, which is an identifier.
It is like a URI, but cannot be a URL, as it tells you nothing about my location or how to contact me.
In this case it also happens to identify at least 5 other people in the USA alone.
- 4914 West Bay Street, Nassau, Bahamas
This is a locator, which is an identifier for that physical location.
It is like both a URL and URI (since all URLs are URIs), and also identifies me indirectly as "resident of..".
In this case it uniquely identifies me, but that would change if I get a roommate.
I say "like" because these examples do not follow the required syntax.
Popular confusion
From Wikipedia:
In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a subset of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for URI, ... [emphasis mine]
Because of this common confusion, many products and documentation incorrectly use one term instead of the other, assign their own distinction, or use them synonymously.
URNs
My name, Roger Pate, could be like a URN (Uniform Resource Name), except those are much more regulated and intended to be unique across both space and time.
Because I currently share this name with other people, it's not globally unique and would not be appropriate as a URN. However, even if no other family used this name, I'm named after my paternal grandfather, so it still wouldn't be unique across time. And even if that wasn't the case, the possibility of naming my descendants after me make this unsuitable as a URN.
URNs are different from URLs in this rigid uniqueness constraint, even though they both share the syntax of URIs.
Best Answer
You can essentially do this 2 ways:
The .htaccess route with mod_rewrite
Add a file called
.htaccess
in your root folder, and add something like this:This will tell Apache to enable mod_rewrite for this folder, and if it gets asked a URL matching the regular expression it rewrites it internally to what you want, without the end user seeing it. Easy, but inflexible, so if you need more power:
The PHP route
Put the following in your .htaccess instead: (note the leading slash)
This will tell it to run your
index.php
for all files it cannot normally find in your site. In there you can then for example:This is how big sites and CMS-systems do it, because it allows far more flexibility in parsing URLs, config and database dependent URLs etc. For sporadic usage the hardcoded rewrite rules in
.htaccess
will do fine though.