Apache 1.3 and AddDefaultCharset

[Arne Goetje <20020531antispam@gmx.net>]

Hi list,

I recognized that in the default debian package the option
AddDefaultCharset is set to 'on' to make iso8859-1 be the default charset. 
This is done with a link to a CERT security advisory about cross site 
scripting.
However, I need apache to deliver in big5 encoding. If I specify the META 
tag in the webpage to set the encoding to big5, nothing happens, I still 
get garbage (iso 8859-1). Only when I turn off the AddDefaultCharset 
function, the page will be shown correctly.
My question is, is it really necessary to set this function in the default 
install?

Cheers
Arne