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Bug#211889: apache: Default Content-encoding of iso-8859-1 is a hindrance



Package: apache
Version: 1.3.27.1-3
Severity: normal


Since 1.3.12, The apache httpd.conf file has had the following lines in it:
(line 821 of my file, though these things change)
---------
# Default charset to iso-8859-1 (http://www.apache.org/info/css-security/).
    
AddDefaultCharset on
---------

This is very annoying, as a lot of web browsers incorrectly assume the
server knows what it's talking about, which is not always the case, and so
my nice UTF-8 HTML documents (which all declare their encoding in a <meta>
tag) turn out mangled because my web browsers (in this case mozilla 1.5,
firebird 0.6, and Internet explorer 6) go and display it as ISO-8859-1.

I suppose the first thing to mention is that iso-8859-1 is obsolete,
replaced by iso-8859-15, which includes the Euro Character instead fo the
less often used Generic Currency Sign at 0xA4. At the very least the default
character set should be changed to that, as it's more commonly in use these
days.

At the same time, it leave users who do not use ISO-8859-15 in the lurch, or
who have several different encodings on the hard drive. mod_cern_meta can
take care of the latter lot fairly easily, but I'd like to suggest the
following instead:

Add a debconf option at installation time to choose between the various
encodings which one the default should be, or to turn this behaviour off.

Alternatively, set it at installation time fromt he user's locale settings.
It may not be correct all of the time, but it'll probably be more correct
most of the time.

Thanks,
Moof - who spent four hours tonight tryign to work out why his UTF-8
documents weren't displaying properly.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux perrin 2.4.21-ac4 #1 SMP Sat Jul 26 01:18:02 CEST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=en_IE@euro, LC_CTYPE=en_IE@euro

Versions of packages apache depends on:
ii  apache-common                 1.3.27.1-3 Support files for all Apache webse
ii  debconf                       1.3.4      Debian configuration management sy
ii  dpkg                          1.10.10    Package maintenance system for Deb
ii  libc6                         2.3.2-3    GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libdb4.1                      4.1.25-4   Berkeley v4.1 Database Libraries [
ii  libexpat1                     1.95.6-4   XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libmagic1                     4.02-4     File type determination library us
ii  logrotate                     3.6.5-2    Log rotation utility
ii  mime-support                  3.23-1     MIME files 'mime.types' & 'mailcap
ii  perl [perl5]                  5.8.0-18   Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

-- debconf information:
  apache/enable-suexec: false




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