Pretty URLs without mod_rewrite, without .htaccess

Question

Without a possibility to access .htaccess I find myself in a creative impasse. There is no mod_rewriting for me. Nevertheless, I want to be able to do the nice stuff like:

http://www.example.com/Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/Title_Of_This_Page

What are my alternatives?

In respond to the answers:

• I'm building with php5
• I don't have access to .htaccess
• http://www.example.com/index.php/Blog/ is a known technique but I don't prefer it. Is shows the php so to say.
• How would I create extensionless PHP-files? Would this do the trick?
• How much would using the custom 404 technique hurt performance?

Answer 1

If you've the permissions to set custom error documents for your server you could use this to redirect 404 requests.

E.g. for Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument)

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

In the index.php you then can proceed your request by using data from the $_SERVER array.

Answer 2

You can also have urls like

http://domain.com/index.php/Blog/Hello_World

out of the box with PHP5. You can then read the URL parameters using

echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];

Remember to validate/filter the PATH_INFO and all other request variables before using them in your application.