On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 05:36:23AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Jan 4, 2004, at 04:03, Brion Vibber wrote:
Is anyone else testing with Apache 2 who can confirm this problem (particularly on Linux)?
I've duplicated the problem on a machine running Fedora Core 1, which has Apache 2.0.47 installed.
In addition to the content-encoding problem, I've noticed that the content-type header lists the wrong charset encoding when (otherwise correctly) showing cached pages, compressed or not. Redhat/Fedora uses UTF-8 as the default locale charset, and apparently inserts this into the default content-type header; in at least some browsers this overrides the meta tag in the HTML which says it's ISO 8859-1. Viewing
Apache 2 has some uber-paranoid security "features"; this is one of them. For example, you have to manually enable public_html for user home pages because the alternative would allow an attacker to find if a given user account exists or not, which is considered a security vulnerability. Apparently, pages without charsets have some Cross Site Scripting issues, so rather than trusting authors to use meta tags, apache decided that all pages should be ISO-8859-1, knowing perfectly well that in both MSIE and Gecko it overrides the meta tag. So if you want the encoding to be UTF-8 apache expects you to give all your pages a ".utf8" extension! No really.
More info at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Sep/0176.html
Fedora made it worse by changing ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, because "all pages will eventually be Unicode encoded", so if yours aren't yet you have to be thankful for being forced to fix them I guess.
Commenting out the line "AddDefaultCharset UTF-8" in httpd.conf should fix this.
Arvind