Wow,  I never got this much publicity when I actually
was a "real" web hosting company :)

I'd already responded privately before I saw this on HP3000-L,
but here is a snippet of that email which answers the question:

>  If you omit the actual page, I have it setup to look
>for a file named "index" with any extention.  You have
>multiple files in that directory with a filename of
>"index", and differing extentions.  The web server picks
>the first file matching the correct "mask" (sorted ascendingly),
>and that happens to be a file named "index.back" with a
>creation date and time of 7/7/99 08:07am.
>The reason I have it setup this way is that when I used to
>be in the web hosting business (I guess I never totally
>got out of that :) some people could not handle filename
>extentions over 3 characters long.  The ".html" part that
>was already in use for my other sites wouldn't cut it for
>them so I changed the initial filename to "index.*" so it
>would pick up their 'index.htm' files.  If also has the
>side-effect of meaning that if you omit the filename, and
>have "index.bak" files in your group, that is what you
>will get instead of the one you really want.

So, there you have it.  'index.back' is chosen over 'index.html'
if you omit that actual page reference in the URL.  I'm
actually running a very old copy of the WebSite server on
that system, but it has proven to be very flexible and reliable
(That system is running Windows NT SBS, and it stays up for
months at a time without missing a beat.  I believe in the philosophy
that once you get a Windows system setup appropriately, don't tinker
with it!)

Regards,
Michael L Gueterman
Easy Does It Technologies
http://www.editcorp.com
Proud host of the Lars Appel web site!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of COLE,GLENN (Non-HP-SantaClara,ex2)
> Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 6:46 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Java + Transact = GUI (also works for COBOL,
> SPL, etc)
>
>
> Greg Stigers wrote Lars and Wirt privately:
>
> >  Perhaps IE or editcorp's web server ignores the actual
> extension, and is
> >  picking up names as they appear alphabetically.
>
> then Wirt sez:
>
> > Lars had been renaming his old index.htm files index.old,
> index.back,
> etc.,
> > but keeping them in the same directory. Doing that now
> clearly seems to be
> > capable of causing some confusion. Apparently the rules are
> now: you can't
> > rename files by merely changing their extensions and expect
> consistent
> > behavior from the various browsers.
>
> I think the actual rules are now:  it depends. ;)
>
> ...in this case, on something called "content negotiation."
> Under "Multiviews" in the Apache docs at
>
>    http://www.apache.org/docs/content-negotiation.html
>
> > 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, and forwards
> > them along.
> >
> > This applies 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.
>
> That page also names a couple RFCs (2295, 2296) which apparently
> address this.
>
> Of course, in this particular case, 'index.html' *did* exist,
> so perhaps none of the above applies.
>
> --Glenn
>