On Tuesday 22 February 2005 10:51 am, David L Norris wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 18:10 -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:
> >On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 09:08:05AM +0800, Peter Farmer wrote:
> >> Assuming the .cgi extension has been globally mapped to the handler
> >> "cgi-script" (from mod_cgi)  and normally  the .html extension is mapped
> >> to the MIME-type "text/html", then the files  *.cgi.html will be
> >> associated with both the "cgi-script" handler and "text/html" MIME-type.
> >> The handler will have precedence here and process the file as a cgi
> >> script ..
> >
> >I don't use AddHandler very often.  Didn't realize .cgi was also
> >cgi.foo.
>
> Oh, I see the problem.  Server was parsing a non-CGI file and blowing
> up.  I think the Multiviews option enables the processing of multiple
> file extensions (right to left).

Not as far as I remember.  Multiveiws is about automatic mapping of  content 
negotiation metadata based on filename. Multiviews deals with arbitrating 
amongst a set of files with a common pathname and different postfixes, using 
just the common name in the url  .  I.E :
if the server receives a request for the url /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. 

So for  example 
foobar.html.fr and  foobar.html.en and  foobar.html.it could all exist and 
only one would be accessed via the url  foobar.html depending on which 
language was favoured by the client application ....
You use of multiviews to access foo.html.php as foo.html is really a sort of 
clever 'hack' using the mapping capability of multiviews to strip off 
the .php before delivery.