<Directory "/path/to/dir">
    AddHandler perl-script .cgi
    PerlHandler Apache::OutputChain Apache::GzipChain Apache::Registry
    allow from all
    PerlSendHeader On

    # Other stuff
</Directory>
[download]

When I tried to access the front page with IE, the browser simply stoped. No error message, just stoped. So I tried connecting to the server via telnet like this:

$ telnet www.example.com 80
Trying 0.0.0.0...
Connected to www.example.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
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And the response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 03:41:25 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

fa1
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

-- Rest of response unimportant --
[download]

My pages are generated from HTML::Template files, and they do have a valid DOCTYPE at the top, on the first line, with the second line starting the PUBLIC section. As you can see above, the first line is being cut off. I tried adding a blank line at the top in the template, but the behavior with IE remained (though a new telnet connect confirmed that the full DOCTYPE was being sent). Taking out the Apache::GzipChain in the chain caused it to work properly again.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated