From: rst@ai.mit.edu (Robert S. Thau)
Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 17:02:42 -0400
Message-Id: <199605292102.RAA06382@love-bug.ai.mit.edu>
To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com
Subject: Re: No HOST header solutions?
Sender: owner-new-httpd@apache.org
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com

  At http://www.apache.org/docs/1.1/host.html, I outline a procedure
  that gives you at least working results with all browsers. It's the
  best I could come up with.

The idea basically is to give each page two names, one of which is
unique server-wide and can therefore be used even by old browsers.
Unfortunately, this has a whole bunch of nasty consequences --- for
one, it's likely that crawlers that aren't savvy to what's going on
(which is probably most, given that the protocol doesn't presently
give them sufficient information to figure it out without a whole lot
of back-end inference) will wind up indexing every single page twice,
once under each name.

Another bit of nastiness is that you've got to be very careful to use
relative URIs for *everything*, or nasty errors start creeping in.

(Of course, if you arrange things so that those prefixes are present
and required even if you *supply* the Host: header, and do a redirect
to http://virtualhost.com/virtualhost if a direct request for
http://virtualhost.com/ itself comes in, then both problems go away).

Hmmm... in search of a simple answer...

rst