Open Source Web Development with LAMP: Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and PHP

10.3. Apache Configuration

Apache needs to be reconfigured to use Embperl to process HTML files. This requires a decision about how to use this module: whether to process every file with Embperl or to tag Embperl files with a special extension (.epl is commonly used) so that only those files are processed.

Processing only the files with the different filename extension is more efficient. The drawbacks are that the extension gives out information about the server, and URLs aren’t uniform, which presents a human factors issue—people remember .html and don’t remember .epl.

There is another good reason not to use special filenames. Suppose you have a page that has no Embperl and is linked everywhere else in your site. If you decide that page needs ...