On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Thom May wrote: > Hi Guys, > this is a newly filed bug from the debian www team; it holds for apache2 > and > is a real problem for us.
As this person seems to somewhat realize, Apache's behavior in this case is following the requirements in the standard. It is the browser that is misconfigured. Making apache try the generic language first would be an explicit violation of the standards and would prevent properly configured clients from using some types of reasonable configurations. (For example, it is perfectly reasonable for someone to prefer "en-uk, fr;q=0.9; en;q=0.8" if they speak both english and french fluently, but aren't very familiar with non-british dialects.) In 2.0, Apache will, however, implicitly add the generic version of the language to the accept-language list with a low priority as described here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/content-negotiation.html#exceptions In 1.3, you can select a single "fallback" language to be returned instead of the multiple-choices message by placing a copy of the file with no language attached. This is described in the "variants with no language" section of http://httpd.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html and in this excellent document: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/lang-neg.html Punchline: I believe that Apache's behaviour here is the best it can be given the HTTP standard. But this question is almost becoming a FAQ, even though it is addressed in the 2.0 content negotiation docs. Joshua.
