Make some of the functionality from .htaccess available

[darobin]

Echidna removes .htaccess files and that is a good, healthy decision. However some specs do make use of features exposed in .htaccess and it would be useful to support reproducing them.

The idea is that the request to publish would include additional parameters, and Echidna would generate a (sane, controlled) .htaccess to include in TR.

It might be useful to look at all the .htaccess in (recent) TR to see what is needed. The functionality that is missing for HTML is the ability to setup a 404 handler.

HTML has a lot of content and it is split into several files. Sometimes the split changes. What we do is we have a special 404 page that looks at the fragment identifier and knows where to redirect users (you can see it in action in the ED area). It would be great to be able to specify 404handler=404.html or something like that to get the behaviour back.

[astorije]

I think that is a great use case of full-featured manifests as mentioned in #111. A JSON or YML file could have these extra parameters all in one place. What do you think?

Regardless of my previous question, it'd be nice to list in this issue description what functionality we want to enable. I wasn't fond of custom 404 handlers, because there might be decisions or policies to stick with the official W3C one, but your use case makes a lot of sense.