I'm a novice with Apache administration. I've spent the last six hours
trying to enable SSI. I'm building a site which will be hosted on a
remote server. To duplicate these conditions on my test server, I'm
enabling SSI through an .htaccess file instead of the httpd.config
file.

But first, I need to enable the httpd.config file to recognize
..htaccess files. The httpd.config file starts like this:

<Directory "/www/webroot">
Order allow,deny
AllowOverride none
Allow from all
</Directory>

When I change it to this:

<Directory "/www/webroot">
Order allow,deny
AllowOverride Options
Allow from all
</Directory>

it stops working. My understanding was that if I did this, then
created a file named .htaccess in the /www/webroot directory which
said:

Options +Includes

AddType text/html .shtml
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml

--that I would enable SSI for all files with the .shtml extension in my
webroot. However, when I restart the server and reload my page, I
receive an "Internal Server Error." I am doing something wrong?

(If it helps any, the only other set of <Directory> tags with a wider
scope looks like this:

<Directory />
Options None
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Directory>
)