Serving XHTML as HTML to MSIE browsers in NginX

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 03:39:13AM -0400, elliottcable wrote:

> Okay, I talked to the nice people in the #NginX IRC room a bit (thanks "merlincorey" and "Damn"!). From a more careful reading of the NginX wiki's documentation, it appears that this should be legal:
> 
> http://github.com/elliottcable/server-configuration/blob/ad48f0b73ea8e2d33fc97bba60ddad2a4abca064/nginx/includes.conf#L7-12
> 
> Here's the reasoning. The wiki declares that the `types {}` declaration is legal within a `location /…/ {}` declaration: http://tr.im/ijbz?nginx - it also declares that the inside of an `if () {}` declaration should inherit context from outside the `if`: http://tr.im/ijbK?nginx (to quote, "Configuration inside directive if is inherited from the previous level."). Therefore, having a `types` declaration inside an `if` inside a `location` should be legal.

Directives allowed within if() blocks has context "if" or "if in 
location" explicitly listed in their documentation.  Directives 
types and default_type aren't allowed inside if's.

> Unfortunately. with the configuration file as linked above, I can't launch NginX; I get an "emergency" level error about syntax that kills it on launch.
> 
> Is this a bug, then? Or is the documentation wrong? In either case, what can I do to get my server fixed to (im)properly serve XHTML to MSIE?

Try something like this:

    location ~ \.xhtml$ {
        error_page  405  = @html;

        if ($http_user_agent ~* MSIE) {
            return  405;
        }
    }

    location @html {
        types  {};
        default_type  text/html;
    }

Maxim Dounin

> 
> Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,839,842#msg-842
> 
>