Mike Wright: >> For further head explosion refer please refer to >> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/content-negotiation.html Tom Horsley: > That was the one that made my head explode :-). > > I have just tried it turning off MultiViews in the > directory where I have my copy of my web pages and > by gosh, it does indeed just show me the file now > instead of running the php script, so even though > my poor brain can't figure out how the heck what the > apache docs say about MultiViews could possibly > cause this, it does indeed appear to be MultiViews > that is causing it. Content negotiation allows the webserver to hold multiple different variations of the same data, and for the webserver and web browser to negotiate between them as to which will be the best version to offer. That could be a web page written in several different languages (each actual version being a different file), and your browser (if you bothered to configure it properly) will state what languages you can read, and hopefully the server will offer the best match. That's relatively simple if there's just one match (e.g. English), becoming more complicated if there's several matches. In that case, there's a weighting applied. Supposedly, the author can score the pages, so that one version is promoted as the best, and other's lesser (e.g. their skills in that language aren't as good, or they used an auto-translater, so that that page may be harder to understand). And supposedly the web browser can score your list of languages that you can read. However, I've yet to see a browser do that, it just seems to let you sort the order of the languages in the list, and the top of the list is supposedly considered best. I've yet to see an example of how the page author can score their pages, short of making explicit configurations of the webserver, per page. And, it can negotiation be for different file types. I could offer downloads of a document in PDF, ODT, DOC, or just TXT, and between the server and the browser working it out, they'd hopefully offer you the best choice (as outlined in the language discussion, above, some weighting automatically picks the best choice). Likewise, I could offer you JPEGs, or GIFs, or PNGs, of the same image, and hopefully offer you the best choice. Unfortunately, with these sorts of negotiated offerings, the usual consideration seems to be merely be picking the smallest size file. And most browsers default configuration says that they'll accept ANY type of file, never mind if that file is actually supported on your system. So you can still get offered file types that you can't actually use. In any case, language or file type of negotiation, the server uses the filename as part of the process. Particularly the file suffix. And multiple file suffixes are allowed. i.e. example.php.txt is a PHP file (to be treated as a PHP file), *AND* a text file. As you've found out, there are problems when you use file suffixes with competing purposes. For fun and games, you could see what happens with example.jpg.txt and example.txt.jpg, with images and text files tried with either names. Similar games with example.html.txt and example.txt.html can be rather confusing (serving HTML or plain text). Even more so when you try to browse using a non-compliant browser, like MSIE, which pays scant attention to the MIME type sent by the server, and snoops at the file data content, instead. Hence, the many misconfigured web servers that seem to work, because the webmaster knows not what they're doing. And hence the many infected Windows machine, because the browser executed the executable program that was deliberately sent to the browser with a safe MIDI filetype description, the browser allowing such a safe thing, then automatically doing what it does with the executable program that it found, instead. But, if you're not using content negotiation, and you don't appear to be, and most people probably do not use it. You can, and probably should, disable the feature. It'll mean less work for the server, and less chance of surprises. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
