Apache HTTP Server Version 2.0
Apache supports content negotiation as described in the HTTP/1.1 specification. It can choose the best representation of a resource based on the browser-supplied preferences for media type, languages, character set and encoding. It also implements a couple of features to give more intelligent handling of requests from browsers that send incomplete negotiation information.
Content negotiation is provided by the mod_negotiation
module, which is compiled in by default.
A resource may be available in several different representations. For example, it might be available in different languages or different media types, or a combination. One way of selecting the most appropriate choice is to give the user an index page, and let them select. However it is often possible for the server to choose automatically. This works because browsers can send, as part of each request, information about what representations they prefer. For example, a browser could indicate that it would like to see information in French, if possible, else English will do. Browsers indicate their preferences by headers in the request. To request only French representations, the browser would send
Accept-Language: fr
Note that this preference will only be applied when there is a choice of representations and they vary by language.
As an example of a more complex request, this browser has been configured to accept French and English, but prefer French, and to accept various media types, preferring HTML over plain text or other text types, and preferring GIF or JPEG over other media types, but also allowing any other media type as a last resort:
Accept-Language: fr; q=1.0, en; q=0.5
Accept: text/html; q=1.0, text/*; q=0.8, image/gif; q=0.6, image/jpeg; q=0.6, image/*; q=0.5, */*; q=0.1
Apache supports 'server driven' content negotiation, as defined in the HTTP/1.1 specification. It fully supports the Accept
, Accept-Language
, Accept-Charset
andAccept-Encoding
request headers. Apache also supports 'transparent' content negotiation, which is an experimental negotiation protocol defined in RFC 2295 and RFC 2296. It does not offer support for 'feature negotiation' as defined in these RFCs.
A resource is a conceptual entity identified by a URI (RFC 2396). An HTTP server like Apache provides access to representations of the resource(s) within its namespace, with each representation in the form of a sequence of bytes with a defined media type, character set, encoding, etc. Each resource may be associated with zero, one, or more than one representation at any given time. If multiple representations are available, the resource is referred to as negotiable and each of its representations is termed a variant. The ways in which the variants for a negotiable resource vary are called the dimensions of negotiation.
In order to negotiate a resource, the server needs to be given information about each of the variants. This is done in one of two ways:
*.var
file) which names the files containing the variants explicitly, orA type map is a document which is associated with the handler named type-map
(or, for backwards-compatibility with older Apache configurations, the MIME type application/x-type-map
). Note that to use this feature, you must have a handler set in the configuration that defines a file suffix as type-map
; this is best done with
AddHandler type-map .var
in the server configuration file.
Type map files should have the same name as the resource which they are describing, and have an entry for each available variant; these entries consist of contiguous HTTP-format header lines. Entries for different variants are separated by blank lines. Blank lines are illegal within an entry. It is conventional to begin a map file with an entry for the combined entity as a whole (although this is not required, and if present will be ignored). An example map file is shown below. This file would be named foo.var
, as it describes a resource named foo
.
URI: foo
URI: foo.en.html
Content-type: text/html
Content-language: en
URI: foo.fr.de.html
Content-type: text/html;charset=iso-8859-2
Content-language: fr, de
Note also that a typemap file will take precedence over the filename's extension, even when Multiviews is on. If the variants have different source qualities, that may be indicated by the "qs" parameter to the media type, as in this picture (available as JPEG, GIF, or ASCII-art):
URI: foo
URI: foo.jpeg
Content-type: image/jpeg; qs=0.8
URI: foo.gif
Content-type: image/gif; qs=0.5
URI: foo.txt
Content-type: text/plain; qs=0.01
qs values can vary in the range 0.000 to 1.000. Note that any variant with a qs value of 0.000 will never be chosen. Variants with no 'qs' parameter value are given a qs factor of 1.0. The qs parameter indicates the relative 'quality' of this variant compared to the other available variants, independent of the client's capabilities. For example, a JPEG file is usually of higher source quality than an ASCII file if it is attempting to represent a photograph. However, if the resource being represented is an original ASCII art, then an ASCII representation would have a higher source quality than a JPEG representation. A qs value is therefore specific to a given variant depending on the nature of the resource it represents.
The full list of headers recognized is available in the mod_negotation typemap documentation.
MultiViews
is a per-directory option, meaning it can be set with an Options
directive within a <Directory>
, <Location>
or <Files>
section in httpd.conf
, or (if AllowOverride
is properly set) in .htaccess
files. Note that Options All
does not set MultiViews
; you have to ask for it by name.
The effect of MultiViews
is as follows: if the server receives a request for /some/dir/foo
, if /some/dir
has MultiViews
enabled, and /some/dir/foo
does not exist, then the server reads the directory looking for files named foo.*, and effectively fakes up a type map which names all those files, assigning them the same media types and content-encodings it would have if the client had asked for one of them by name. It then chooses the best match to the client's requirements.
MultiViews
may also apply to searches for the file named by the DirectoryIndex
directive, if the server is trying to index a directory. If the configuration files specify
DirectoryIndex index
then the server will arbitrate between index.html
and index.html3
if both are present. If neither are present, and index.cgi
is there, the server will run it.
If one of the files found when reading the directory does not have an extension recognized by mod_mime
to designate its Charset, Content-Type, Language, or Encoding, then the result depends on the setting of the MultiViewsMatch
directive. This directive determines whether handlers, filters, and other extension types can participate in MultiViews negotiation.
After Apache has obtained a list of the variants for a given resource, either from a type-map file or from the filenames in the directory, it invokes one of two methods to decide on the 'best' variant to return, if any. It is not necessary to know any of the details of how negotiation actually takes place in order to use Apache's content negotiation features. However the rest of this document explains the methods used for those interested.
There are two negotiation methods:
Dimension | Notes |
---|---|
Media Type | Browser indicates preferences with the Accept header field. Each item can have an associated quality factor. Variant description can also have a quality factor (the "qs" parameter). |
Language | Browser indicates preferences with the Accept-Language header field. Each item can have a quality factor. Variants can be associated with none, one or more than one language. |
Encoding | Browser indicates preference with the Accept-Encoding header field. Each item can have a quality factor. |
Charset | Browser indicates preference with the Accept-Charset header field. Each item can have a quality factor. Variants can indicate a charset as a parameter of the media type. |
Apache can use the following algorithm to select the 'best' variant (if any) to return to the browser. This algorithm is not further configurable. It operates as follows:
Accept
header with the quality-of-source factor for this variants media type, and select the variants with the highest value.Accept-Language
header (if present), or else the order of languages in the LanguagePriority
directive (if present).Accept-Charset
header line. Charset ISO-8859-1 is acceptable unless explicitly excluded. Variants with a text/*
media type but not explicitly associated with a particular charset are assumed to be in ISO-8859-1.Vary
is set to indicate the dimensions of negotiation (browsers and caches can use this information when caching the resource). End.Vary
header to indicate the dimensions of variance.Apache sometimes changes the quality values from what would be expected by a strict interpretation of the Apache negotiation algorithm above. This is to get a better result from the algorithm for browsers which do not send full or accurate information. Some of the most popular browsers send Accept
header information which would otherwise result in the selection of the wrong variant in many cases. If a browser sends full and correct information these fiddles will not be applied.
The Accept:
request header indicates preferences for media types. It can also include 'wildcard' media types, such as "image/*" or "*/*" where the * matches any string. So a request including:
Accept: image/*, */*
would indicate that any type starting "image/" is acceptable, as is any other type. Some browsers routinely send wildcards in addition to explicit types they can handle. For example:
Accept: text/html, text/plain, image/gif, image/jpeg, */*
The intention of this is to indicate that the explicitly listed types are preferred, but if a different representation is available, that is ok too. Using explicit quality values, what the browser really wants is something like:
Accept: text/html, text/plain, image/gif, image/jpeg, */*; q=0.01
The explicit types have no quality factor, so they default to a preference of 1.0 (the highest). The wildcard */* is given a low preference of 0.01, so other types will only be returned if no variant matches an explicitly listed type.
If the Accept:
header contains no q factors at all, Apache sets the q value of "*/*", if present, to 0.01 to emulate the desired behavior. It also sets the q value of wildcards of the format "type/*" to 0.02 (so these are preferred over matches against "*/*". If any media type on the Accept:
header contains a q factor, these special values are not applied, so requests from browsers which send the explicit information to start with work as expected.
New in Apache 2.0, some exceptions have been added to the negotiation algorithm to allow graceful fallback when language negotiation fails to find a match.
When a client requests a page on your server, but the server cannot find a single page that matches the Accept-language
sent by the browser, the server will return either a "No Acceptable Variant" or "Multiple Choices" response to the client. To avoid these error messages, it is possible to configure Apache to ignore the Accept-language
in these cases and provide a document that does not explicitly match the client's request. The ForceLanguagePriority
directive can be used to override one or both of these error messages and substitute the servers judgement in the form of the LanguagePriority
directive.
The server will also attempt to match language-subsets when no other match can be found. For example, if a client requests documents with the language en-GB
for British English, the server is not normally allowed by the HTTP/1.1 standard to match that against a document that is marked as simply en
. (Note that it is almost surely a configuration error to include en-GB
and not en
in the Accept-Language
header, since it is very unlikely that a reader understands British English, but doesn't understand English in general. Unfortunately, many current clients have default configurations that resemble this.) However, if no other language match is possible and the server is about to return a "No Acceptable Variants" error or fallback to the LanguagePriority
, the server will ignore the subset specification and match en-GB
against en
documents. Implicitly, Apache will add the parent language to the client's acceptable language list with a very low quality value. But note that if the client requests "en-GB; q=0.9, fr; q=0.8", and the server has documents designated "en" and "fr", then the "fr" document will be returned. This is necessary to maintain compliance with the HTTP/1.1 specification and to work effectively with properly configured clients.
In order to support advanced techniques (such as cookies or special URL-paths) to determine the user's preferred language, since Apache 2.0.47 mod_negotiation
recognizes the environment variable prefer-language
. If it exists and contains an appropriate language tag, mod_negotiation
will try to select a matching variant. If there's no such variant, the normal negotiation process applies.
SetEnvIf Cookie "language=en" prefer-language=en
SetEnvIf Cookie "language=fr" prefer-language=fr
Apache extends the transparent content negotiation protocol (RFC 2295) as follows. A new {encoding ..}
element is used in variant lists to label variants which are available with a specific content-encoding only. The implementation of the RVSA/1.0 algorithm (RFC 2296) is extended to recognize encoded variants in the list, and to use them as candidate variants whenever their encodings are acceptable according to the Accept-Encoding
request header. The RVSA/1.0 implementation does not round computed quality factors to 5 decimal places before choosing the best variant.
If you are using language negotiation you can choose between different naming conventions, because files can have more than one extension, and the order of the extensions is normally irrelevant (see the mod_mime documentation for details).
A typical file has a MIME-type extension (e.g., html
), maybe an encoding extension (e.g., gz
), and of course a language extension (e.g., en
) when we have different language variants of this file.
Examples:
Here some more examples of filenames together with valid and invalid hyperlinks:
Filename | Valid hyperlink | Invalid hyperlink |
---|---|---|
foo.html.en | foo foo.html |
- |
foo.en.html | foo | foo.html |
foo.html.en.gz | foo foo.html |
foo.gz foo.html.gz |
foo.en.html.gz | foo | foo.html foo.html.gz foo.gz |
foo.gz.html.en | foo foo.gz foo.gz.html |
foo.html |
foo.html.gz.en | foo foo.html foo.html.gz |
foo.gz |
Looking at the table above, you will notice that it is always possible to use the name without any extensions in a hyperlink (e.g., foo
). The advantage is that you can hide the actual type of a document rsp. file and can change it later, e.g., from html
to shtml
or cgi
without changing any hyperlink references.
If you want to continue to use a MIME-type in your hyperlinks (e.g. foo.html
) the language extension (including an encoding extension if there is one) must be on the right hand side of the MIME-type extension (e.g., foo.html.en
).
When a cache stores a representation, it associates it with the request URL. The next time that URL is requested, the cache can use the stored representation. But, if the resource is negotiable at the server, this might result in only the first requested variant being cached and subsequent cache hits might return the wrong response. To prevent this, Apache normally marks all responses that are returned after content negotiation as non-cacheable by HTTP/1.0 clients. Apache also supports the HTTP/1.1 protocol features to allow caching of negotiated responses.
For requests which come from a HTTP/1.0 compliant client (either a browser or a cache), the directive CacheNegotiatedDocs
can be used to allow caching of responses which were subject to negotiation. This directive can be given in the server config or virtual host, and takes no arguments. It has no effect on requests from HTTP/1.1 clients.
For more information about content negotiation, see Alan J. Flavell's Language Negotiation Notes. But note that this document may not be updated to include changes in Apache 2.0.