Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"

[nicole.healthline]

Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html

I have a couple questions:

1. Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling?

2. Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?

[john4math]

1. It seems like canonicalizing the URLs is still a good idea.  For one, there are other search engines that respect the tag, so you want them to do the right things.  However, it does sound like for Google that this could replace the need for canonicalization tags due to URL parameters.  If you have duplicate content that's not caused by URL parameters, you'd still need the canonical tag. Just to be safe, I'm still doing both.

2. When I logged into my webmaster tools, all of the parameters Google had found were there already.  I went through and edited them and added the new information.