Apache AddDefaultCharset

As I found out today after a server move and a subsequent long search, the AddDefaultCharset directive is switched on by default in current Red Hat Apache installations, in httpd.conf. ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 are specified once. These directives ensure that text and HTML files are sent with the appropriate charset in the header if you don’t take care of the header yourself. Most browsers then ignore a charset that may be specified in the META tag, which can lead to a lot of confusion, since the problem cannot be identified in the source code, but still nonsense ends up in the database if, for example, you are currently using ISO-8859-2 .

The sense of this action doesn’t really make sense to me, because I actually think it makes more sense to bind the charset to be used to the application or the individual files and not to the server. After commenting out the two lines, everything went as before.