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.