But we don't always have hosts who have mod_rewrite enabled, and some might even deny our humble request. What do we do then? I looked around (mostly Google Search) and all the alternatives seem to require your links in the fashion: http://example.com/index.php/something/like/this and then splitting up $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] in index.php.
While this works, I don't like the index.php in the URL
So then I got an idea, maybe this has been done before, but I couldn't find it being implemented anywhere. Why can't we just set up a custom error handler in .htaccess with ErrorDocument (this functionality is usually more available than RewriteRule) to handle 404 errors and redirect them to a PHP page which can then break up the URL to give some meaningful output.
The only fault in this I see is that although the responseText will contain the expected page, the HTTP Status will be 404, which is bad web design. But can't we just change the response code using PHP's header() function and make it work like a normal page?
I'm not sure whether this idea is good, bad design, infeasable or just stupid. Comments are appreciated