The other part, is a bit harder to explain. And in fact, i have not yet figured out the details of how to do this in PHP: so here is the Rails code :p
ActionController::Routing::.... do |map| ... map.connect "blog/:year/:month/:day/:title" #in Ruby ":month/" is like the "$month/" in PHP :controller => "blog" :action => "show_date" #we call this callback, in drupal :requirements => {:year => /(19|20)\d\d/, :month => /[01]?\d/, etc ... an array with preg-stuff to filter out dates done
now, RoRs smartness comes to play. and here is where i have n clue how to do this in drupal, yet.
You don't know how to do it, yet you repeatedly state that we can save hooks, variables, memory and code? I'm not convinced yet, but hopefully you can come up with a working prototype though. It looks like an interesting path to explore. :) -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/