When browsing a Subversion repository, the web browser gets a clue about how to render a file's contents by looking at the Content-Type: header returned in Apache's response to the HTTP GET request. The value of this header is some sort of MIME type. By default, Apache will tell the web browsers that all repository files are of the “default” MIME type, typically text/plain. This can be frustrating, however, if a user wishes repository files to render as something more meaningful—for example, it might be nice to have a foo.html file in the repository actually render as HTML when browsing.

To make this happen, you only need to make sure that your files have the proper svn:mime-type set. This is discussed in more detail in the section called “File Content Type”, and you can even configure your client to automatically attach proper svn:mime-type properties to files entering the repository for the first time; see the section called “Automatic Property Setting”.

So in our example, if one were to set the svn:mime-type property to text/html on file foo.html, then Apache would properly tell your web browser to render the file as HTML. One could also attach proper image/* mime-type properties to images, and by doing this, ultimately get an entire web site to be viewable directly from a repository! There's generally no problem with doing this, as long as the website doesn't contain any dynamically-generated content.