The Abbreviation Challenge
The strategy is to abbreviate the longest, most frequently accessed URLs with the shortest abbreviations. Most webmasters choose one, two, or three-letter abbreviations for directories. On WebReference.com, the goal was to create a mod_rewrite rule that would expand URLs like this:
r/d
into this:
dhtml/
Like Yahoo!, r is the flag we've chosen for redirects. But why stop there? We can extend this concept into more directories. So turn this:
r/dc
into this:
dhtml/column
and so on. Note that the lack of a trailing forward slash in this second example allows us to intelligently append column numbers.
With the right RewriteRule, the abbreviation of /r/c/66 expands into the string /dhtml/column66/.