iTP Secure WebServer System Administrator's Guide (iTPWebSvr 6.0+)

Configuration Directives
iTP Secure WebServer System Administrator’s Guide—523346-002
A-32
Description
Description
Use the Negotiation directive to specify the how the iTP Secure WebServer will
select from available representations of a requested page. For example, if the same
content is available in multiple languages, the server can provide the content in the
user’s preferred language. Content negotiation is defined in the HTTP/1.1
specification; the iTP Secure WebServer supports server-driven content negotiation, as
described in that document. The multiview negotiation option is not defined in the
HTTP/1.1 specification but is a feature of the Apache HTTP/1.1 server.
If you specify the argument None, the server does not perform content negotiation. In
this case, if the file requested by the client is not present at the specified URL, the
server returns an error status (404) to the client, reporting that the resource is missing.
If you specify the argument Lang, the server selects content based on a language tag.
A language tag consists of an RFC 2068 language abbreviation, optionally followed by
a hyphen and a subtag; a subtag can be either an RFC 2068 country code or some
other registered code. For example, the code en-US signifies American English, and
the code fr signifies French. The client specifies the preferred language tag or tags in
the Accept-language header; if no such header appears in the request, the server uses
the value or values specified in the LanguagePreference directive. To support this
feature, the target directory must have subdirectories with names corresponding to the
language tags. For example, if the client requests a French language representation of
the page /store1/welcome, the server looks for the file in the directory /store1/fr/.
To see RFC 2068, use the following URL:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc2068.html
If an Accept-Language header is present, the server searches for a subdirectory that
matches a language tag in that header. To specify precedence among the tags,
HTTP/1.1 defines the concept of a q value for each tag; the server searches for
subdirectories in order of descending q value. If no q values are specified, the server
searches for subdirectories in the order in which the language tags occur in the
Accept-language header.
If you specify the argument Mult, the server selects content based not only on a
language tag, but also on other headers in the request, matching the specified criteria
to file extensions (not subdirectories) in the target directory. For example, if the client
requests a French language, HTML representation of the page /store1/welcome, the
server expects the file to be named /store1/welcome.fr.html or /store1/welcome.html.fr.
If no file matches all the criteria specified in the request, the server weighs the criteria
as follows, from highest to lowest priority:
•
Content or media type (such as audio/basic, text/html) from the Accept header
•
Natural language (such as en, de) from the Accept-language header
•
Content encoding (such as compress, gzip) from the Accept-encoding header