Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 16:46:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>
Subject: Re: 0.7.2k and an idea
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On Mon, 19 Jun 1995, Rob Hartill wrote:
> > Perhaps another way to accomplish this given the current framework woudld 
> > be to have apache parse .asis files for Content-type and then act upon 
> > them if it sees any magic mime types.  Would sort of hurt the efficiency 
> > of asis files, but since that's the cleanest way we have of attaching 
> > metainfo right now anyways.....
> 
> but that doens't solve the problem I was trying to address, that of
> wanting to change the type of an existing URL.
> 
> foo.html is well established, so I can't have a foo.asis for it.

Ah, but you could have a "foo.html.asis".  :)

> A map file would let me say, "foo.html" is obsolete, use "foo.asis"
> instead, but the real beauty of all this for us with Apache, is that
> we can say, "foo.html" is obsolete, use "foo" instead.. and let the
> multiviews/cn do the dirty work of picking the appropriate file. This
> would let everyone migrate to content-type-free URLs, while still
> supporting the old external links, and the migration would be transparent
> and painless to everyone.

Let's just change the "not found" rule, so that if a file "foo.html" 
isn't found, it tries "foo.map", and if that isn't found *and*
multiviews is turned on, it looks for "foo", doing globbing as needed.  
If you happened to have a "foo.gif", well, you're asking for it :)

> In terms of XBITHACK, the map file would have a list of well established
> .html (+x bit) filenames which no longer exist, and ideally, they'd
> map to extensionless filenames, which multiviews would use to pick a
> .shtml file, which apache would parse. One could also have a .shtml+
> to parse the HTML and send a last_modified too.

I'd like to make filenames as opaque as possible, really.  Either that or 
have a formal (internal to apache) specification for them, so that file 
names could be used to express other meta-information as well.

	Brian

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