Topic awaiting preservation: Dynamic Pages with Static URL's

I have been doing a lot of thinking on how to make my dynamic pages a bit easier for the search engines as well as much more person readable.
http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?id=123 just isn't as fun as say: http://www.yoursite.com/pagetitle.php

So I am trying to figure out something to this effect.

There person goes to a url http://www.yoursite.com/pagetitle.php, the URL would be parsed as http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?id=title.

However it would not be a redirect it would be all handled on the client side. The problem I am running into is that pagetitle.php would not really exist. I don't know how to exactly handle this.

I was thinking that mod_rewrite would be the way to do this but I am not exactly sure. If you have information on this I would appreciate it.

I just finished a book of case studies, Usability: The Site Speaks For Itself. One of the case studies was of our friends in Buffalo, evolt.org. The book devotes a lot of pages to the subject.

Fortunately, this query at evolt returns two how-to articles with full code examples.

Have fun!

"the most incredible feats are often accomplished by
those who have had the most incredible challenges"

Thanks a lot that was exactly what I was looking for.