Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why I Hate the Apache Web Server

Posted by Zonk on from the feel-the-hate-flow-through-you dept.

schon writes "Today's the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation entitled 'Why I Hate the Apache Web Server' for anyone who has expressed frustration with the various inconsistencies and nuances of the Internet's favourite config file. And yes, it includes a comparison to Sendmail."

2 of 558 comments (clear)

  1. How to fund Apache improvements by joelparker · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I worked at Sun and tried to fund Apache improvements to make it smoother for my team's webmasters. No luck.

    Apache is great but it could be *significantly* easier for beginning webmasters. And for companies to fund changes.

  2. Some more by plj · · Score: 3, Interesting
    OK, let's see it:

    First, we have this.

    And a quote from the default config file:
    # Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is
    # always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation
    # of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as
    # a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page
    # is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you
    # are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security
    # reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing
    # which encourage you to always set a default char set.
    OK. So I'll define as follows:
    AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
    Then, we have this.

    OK, so I have some legacy documents, so I'll just define as follows in <HEAD>:
    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
    And let's try it out... WTF?? It does not work! My browser thinks it is UTF-8.

    Oh wait, it actually works, if I'll define this instead of that above:
    <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    Brilliant! So if the AddDefaultCharset is defined in httpd.conf, the Content-Type encoding of the actual document must be defined in lowercase, or it'll be ingnored! Now, where the f*** this is documented??! Examples at w3.org specifically uses uppercase. Apache permits uppercase in httpd.conf.

    Apache messed it up again.
    --
    “Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus