On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:11:22AM -0500, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> > index.html.html is
> > just there for misconfigured browsers.)
>
> Er, no... it's for the admin so they don't have to watch emits that the language
> wasn't matched in their logs? I still find this entire approach (having been
> buried in directory_walk, mod_alias and mod_negotiation cruft for the better part
> of a week) entirely bogus.
Not even that. It's for multi-Language servers where the client does
a request for a non-existing Language (replace Language by any other
Vary-ing dimension). With MultiViews and AddLanguage en
(and fr and zh and de) and copies of the DirectoryIndex file
existing only in .en and .zh versions,
a client submitting a request with "Accept-Language: fr,de"
will get neither the .en nor the .zh version, but will get a
[406 Not Acceptable] or [300 Multiple Choices] error instead.
Adding a .html.html version (usually a symlink to the .html.en version)
will provide a fallback which will be selected if none of the
available and the requested languages coincide.
So: YES, it is a hack. A directive "FallBackLanguage en" would be
much better. But currently, this "established hack" makes client
users much happier.
And: No, it's not for "misconfigured" browsers (unless you consider
ita misconfiguration when users configure their native language in the
browsers, but forget to manually add a "en;q=0.01" as a fallback).
And it's not (only) there to clean up the log (though you will find an
extra 406 response -and maybe no 200 response at all if the client
gives up after seeing the error- in the access_log if you forget it).
Martin
--
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Fujitsu Siemens
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | 81730 Munich, Germany
