title: How do I resolve this .htaccess conflict?
body: <p>I have the following .htaccess rule in order to enable "clean" URLs, i.e. strip the .html extension from file names:</p>
  
  <pre><code>RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It works perfectly in 90 percent of directories on the site, except for directories that have an index.html in them.  Linking to those directories as /directory results in the following error:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Forbidden</p>
    
    <p>You don't have permission to access /directory/.html on this server.</p>
    
    <p>Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to
    use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Linking to these directories as /directory/index is not desirable, because URLs with "index" in them are not presentable.</p>
  
  <p>To get around this issue, I tried renaming those few index.<strong>html</strong> files to index.<strong>htm</strong>, but that results in the same error message when accessing /directory.</p>
  
  <p>I am especially confused about this part:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>You don't have permission to access /directory/.html on this server.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Why does Apache think that I am trying to access /directory/.html when in reality I am trying to access index.htm?</p>
  
  <p><strong><em>Edit:</em></strong>
  Per Panama Jack's request, I am posting the entire .htaccess file below</p>
  
  <p>Original:</p>
  
  <pre><code>RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
  
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Edit #1:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Options -MultiViews
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
  
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ $1.html [NC,L]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here are a few entries from the apache error log
  These errors happen with my original .htaccess</p>
  
  <pre><code>client denied by server configuration: /home/user/public_html/ar/.html
  File does not exist: /home/user/public_html/403.shtml
  client denied by server configuration: /home/user/public_html/zh_TW/.html
  File does not exist: /home/user/public_html/403.shtml
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>These errors happen with the Edit #1 version of htaccess:</p>
  
  <pre><code>File does not exist: /home/user/public_html/en/directory1, referer: http://example.com/en/directory1
  Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace., referer: http://example.com/en/directory1
  File does not exist: /home/user/public_html/en/directory2, referer: http://example.com/
  Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace., referer: http://example.com/
  </code></pre>