Re: Request for an Apache configuration change

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 3/04/2004 2:37 AM, Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> Carlos Perelló Marín <carlos gnome org> writes:
>  
>
> > With the recent widget.gnome.org changes the Apache server serves by
> > default all content as UTF-8 but all our pages are not in UTF-8 and we
> > have some problems like:
> >    
> Long term we need to serve all our pages in UTF-8.
>  
Sure, but that isn't directly relevant to the problem at hand.

The AddDefaultCharset option just blindly adds "charset=foo" to the end 
of all text/* mime types served by the web server.  It doesn't actually 
check whether the pages are in that encoding.

Now if the page gets served just as "text/html", the web browser will do 
charset detection (by looking for an appropriate <meta> tag).  If a 
charset is specified in both the <meta> tag and the Content-type HTTP 
header, the Content-type header wins (even though the <meta> tag is 
probably more accurate).

If we move our documents over to UTF-8 and include correct <meta> tags 
(xsltproc will automatically insert them for files it processes), then 
everything will work.

The way apache suggests you work is to use the AddDefaultCharset 
directive to set a default, then put a suffix (like .iso8859-1 or .utf8) 
on all files with a different encoding.  This doesn't really seem 
manageable for our current set of content.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
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