Hi HP3000-L,

I just learned something interesting regarding default web browser language
configurations.

I was testing the new WebWise Secure Web Server and while browsing through the
online web page documentation installed with the server, I wasn't seeing the
expected mentions of the SSL add-ons.

Investigation into the mod_ssl build process revealed that it only modifies the
  *.en English-specific versions of the Apache manual web pages, i.e.
foo.html.en instead of foo.html.

OK, fine, but since the default Apache configuration enables Options MultiViews
for content negotiation on the manual web pages, why wasn't I seeing the *.en
content from MSIE?  I was only seeing the unmodified *.html content.

So then I checked the MSIE configs via Tools, Internet Options, Languages
button.  Lo and behold, the Microsoft default here was "English (United States)
[en-us]".  So due to the content negotiation feature, Apache was looking for
*.en-us files and not finding them, and so it was falling back to the plain
*.html files which were not modified to talk about the SSL options.

I then modified my MSIE languages to try "English [en]" after en-us, and now I
can see the appropriate *.en web pages.

Next I fired up Netscape Communicator and checked its default language
configuration.  Of course, expecting consistency would be too much, but at
least Netscape uses the more generic default of "English [en]".  So since
consistency is a good thing ;-), I modified my Netscape languages preferences
to try [en-us] before generic [en].

Moral of the story: check your browser language preferences.  If your native
language has both a country-specific form and a generic form, make sure you
have both of them configured in your browser.

I suppose you could argue that mod_ssl should also modify the *.html files in
addition to the *.en ones, but then I wouldn't have discovered this much more
interesting situation.  ;-)
--
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