From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Description of problem: Japanese documents with correct character set encoding in the meta tags are rendered as garbage by browsers that tend to believe Apache instead of the meta tags (which is pretty much most of them) because the default httpd.conf sets AddDefaultCharset to UTF-8. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): httpd-2.0.46-40.ent How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Upgrade a fully functional RHL 7.3 Japanese website to RHEL 3. 2. 3. Actual Results: The httpd server tells browsers that documents are all UTF-8 encoded, which generates lots of complaints from users who are looking at garbage on their screens because most browsers will accept the dictates of an Apache server instead of a document's meta tags. Expected Results: Seamless upgrade. Additional info: <http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23421> argues that the best thing to do here is simply comment out the "AddDefaultCharset UTF-8" line from the httpd.conf file that is shipped with the RHEL3 httpd rpm.
Thanks for contacting us. We agree with upstream in considering an AddDefaultCharset setting to be the correct default. As mentioned in the upstream bug report, it is necessary to enforce a default charset setting in Content-Type headers to prevent some possible cross-site-scripting security issues. It is true that browsers are required to honour the charset from the Content-Type header over the META tag by the HTML standards. The solution is to ensure that the correct charset is sent in the Content-Type header is sent for every page; two methods which allow this are: 1) name documents with one of the suffixes mapped by the AddCharset settings; e.g. "page.html.jis" will get a charset of ISO-2022-JP. 2) allow users to override the AddDefaultContentType in .htaccess files as necessary. Of course, if you do not consider the Cross-Site-Scripting issues to be relevant, it is also possible to remove the AddDefaultCharset setting from httpd.conf.