Site Design Questions: Path Generation

[Ikkarix]

I am very impressed overall by the site design: The editor is nice and does a lot of things automatically, it makes use of HTML5 technologies and dynamically updates itself, it is well optimized for mobile platforms, it automatically saves draft posts, it's aesthetically pleasing, etc. Massive kudos to the web devs.

I find web design quite interesting and may be developing some of my own projects in the future. I'd be interested to know the reasoning behind the paths that the site generates, as they are quite curious.

For example, the home tab generates the path "http://www.curvage.org/forum/index.php?/index.html/", even though omitting the query component returns the page just fine. The path to the this forum is a whopping "http://www.curvage.org/forum/index.php?/forums/forum/23-suggestions". I'm sure there's good reasons for everything (maybe compatibility with a legacy system?), but here are the things I find most odd about the paths:

1. The filename (index.php) is visible. Most big websites (say YouTube) don't show the filename, as it's unnecessary if you form your paths a certain way (like point #3) and have your web server configured to return "index.php" as the index.
    
2. The entire site is at a /forum subpath. The entire site has multiple sections, so putting everything under a /forum path rather than having /forums, /chat, /browse, etc. makes the paths it generate much less intuitive. The homepage could simply be the root path (/) also.
    
3. Every page on the site is requested through a query rather than a resource path. I'd imagine this is largely the reason for point #2. I don't think I've ever seen a site do this, and while it must be valid (as the page loads of course), I'm sure this would make RFC 2396 rather grumpy. It looks like all the code for the site has been dumped into a single file. Having a path like /forums/front-desk/suggestions/topicstub[?page=n][#post] seems much cleaner. Right now the path has the word "forum" in it three times. XD

Again, don't get me wrong: The software behind this site puts pretty much every other php forum to shame (except maybe Discourse, that's pretty baller). I'm always interested in the stories behind things though, so if there's a good reason things are the way they are, it'd be interesting to know.

Thanks!