Monthly Archives: July 2004

Directory Listings Finally Work!

Server-Side

I’ve been struggling with this for a while now. I couldn’t figure out how to set up my server with multivews, yet still allow enable autoindex to work, instead of returning an HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden error. I ended up finding out that I needed to extend the Options directive with the Indexes parameter. eg.

Options Multiviews Indexes

I’m now working on trying to get the directory indexes to be produced as valid XHTML, rather than invalid HTML 4.0 Transitional. Currently, the server is running Apache 1.3.26, so the IndexOptions XHTML directive is not supported, since it is new to Apache 2.0.49. So I’ve sent of a request to my ISP to see if they will upgrade for me, but they may not.

What I would really like is a way to define the template file for the directory index, although I haven’t yet discovered how to do that, or even if it is possible. That way I could make it XHTML 1.0 Strict, and hopefully be able to configure the server to deliver the content as application/xhtml+xml, rather than text/html So, if anyone reading this (if I ever get any readers) knows a way to do this, or to improve any of my server settings, please post a comment or email me to let me know.

A Whole New Blog!

Personal

Recently, I decided that it would be worth while for me to create a seperate blog from Net Twits where I can post items related to more general events, web development and other things. Net Twits will remain, and I will continue to post to it, however it will be entirely dedicated to Twits!

So, for my first post to this new blog, I’m happy to report that the construction of my website is coming along nicely. The stylesheet is taking longer than I would hope to create, however I’ve just been so busy with other jobs, such as rebuilding The Farmshed website. That’s the company I work for — the current site is quite awful, but after the rebuild, due for completion in October, it will, hopefully, be standards compliant and should at least validate.

Other than work, I’ve been keeping up with the latest developments with the WHATWG (as some would prefer to call a Task Force because of the better acronym: WHATTF), though I’m still somewhat undecided as to whether this is a good thing for the web. One thing I’m sure about is that I most certainly do not agree with Ian Hickson (aka. Hixie) that new markup languages should be backwards compatible with IE, but as far as Hixie is concerned, that’s very important for any new language to at least stand a chance of being successful.