This section is from the "Version Control with Subversion" book, by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato. Also available from Amazon: Version Control with Subversion.
You generally will get more use out of URLs to
versioned files—after all, that's where the
interesting content tends to lie. But you might have
occasion to browse a Subversion directory listing, where
you'll quickly note that the generated HTML used to
display that listing is very basic, and certainly not
intended to be aesthetically pleasing (or even
interesting). To enable customization of these directory
displays, Subversion provides an XML index feature. A
single SVNIndexXSLT directive in your
repository's Location block of
httpd.conf will instruct mod_dav_svn
to generate XML output when displaying a directory
listing, and to reference the XSLT stylesheet of your
choice:
<Location /svn> DAV svn SVNParentPath /var/svn SVNIndexXSLT "/svnindex.xsl" … </Location>
Using the SVNIndexXSLT directive and
a creative XSLT stylesheet, you can make your directory
listings match the color schemes and imagery used in other
parts of your website. Or, if you'd prefer, you can use
the sample stylesheets provided in the Subversion source
distribution's tools/xslt/ directory.
Keep in mind that the path provided to the
SVNIndexXSLT directory is actually a URL
path—browsers need to be able to read your
stylesheets in order to make use of them!