I'll often see a URL that looks something like this:

site.com/articles/may/05/02/2011/article-name.php

Surely all of those subdirectories don't actually exist? It seems like it would be a huge redundancy, even if it was only an identical index file in every directory. To change anything you'd have to change every single one.

I guess my question is, is there some more elegant way that sites usually accomplish this?